Hi, I'm Maaz! Resume Academic CV @mmaaz_98 @mmaaz-git MathOverflow m dot maaz at utoronto dot ca

I'm a PhD student in Operations Research at the University of Toronto. I work in optimization and machine learning with healthcare applications. I hold an NSERC Vanier Scholarship -- the top PhD scholarship in Canada, awarded to only 55 students per year. I'm glad to be supervised by Timothy Chan.

Currently, I'm extremely interested in algebraic geometry, polynomial optimization, and automated theorem proving (yes there are healthcare applications, I'm developing them!). I'm also passionate about building good scientific computing software. I developed a solver for polynomials with algebraic coefficients, which is now officially part of SymPy. I built one of the first open-source implementations of cylindrical algebraic decomposition (CAD) -- a fundamental algorithm in real algebraic geometry -- and the first in Python.

Previously, I've worked on drones for cardiac arrest response and the combinatorics of medical residency matching.

From Feb to July 2024, I was a visiting student at MIT under the supervision of Dimitris Bertsimas, where I worked on multimodal artificial intelligence for healthcare. In summer 2022, I was an intern at Amazon Alexa where I worked on unsupervised learning.

In my free time I enjoy powerlifting and reading.

I love talking with people. If you want to talk about research, interesting ideas, or have pointers to internship/full-time positions in industry R&D, please reach out!

My favorite theorem right now
Hilbert (1888). Every non-negative homogeneous polynomial in \(n\) variables and degree \(2d\) can be represented as sum of squares of other polynomials if and only if either (a) \(n = 2\), or (b) \(2d = 2\), or (c) \(n = 3\) and \(2d = 4\).
This surprising result is historically important as it preludes Hilbert's seventeenth problem, Artin's affirmative solution to it, and eventually the modern field of sum-of-squares programming!