Alex Levin

graduate student in applied mathematics

About me

I am a fourth-year student in the department of mathematics at MIT. Before graduate school, I studied math at Harvard and then spent a year working in finance.

My current interests include algorithms and computational biology.

Outside of classes and research, I have organized the student applied math seminar, and have occasionally contributed to the AMS grad student blog.

Papers

  1. James Kingsbery, Alex Levin, Anatoly Preygel, and Cesar Silva. Measurable dynamics of maps on profinite groups. Indag. Math. (N.S.) 18 (2007), no. 4, 561-581. (journal version [gated]; arXiv)
  2. ---. "On Measure-Preserving C^1 transformations of compact-open subsets of non-Archimedean local fields." Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 361 (2009), 61-85. (journal version [gated]; arXiv)
  3. ---. "Dynamics of the p-adic shift and applications." Disc. Cont. Dyn. Sys. - A, 30 (2011), no. 1, 209-218. (journal) (arXiv)
  4. Jonathan A. Kelner and Alex Levin. "Spectral sparsification in the semi-streaming setting." In Proceedings of the 28th International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS), pp. 440-451, 2011. (Proceedings version) (slides)
  5. Alex Levin. "Some variants on spectral sparsification." (unpublished manuscript)

    The material in this paper has been improved and expanded in a joint work with Ioannis Koutis and Richard Peng

  6. Alex Levin, Mieszko Lis, Yann Ponty, Charles W. O'Donnell, Srinivas Devadas, Bonnie Berger, and Jerome Waldispuhl. "Global sampling improves RNA secondary structure design." Submitted.
  7. Ioannis Koutis, Alex Levin, and Richard Peng. "Improved spectral sparsification and numerical algorithms for SDD matrices." Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS) 2012, to appear.

Talks

  1. "A Random Talk on Expanders." MIT SPAMS Seminar, October 9, 2008 (slides) (additional resources)

  2. "Compressed Sensing and Sparse Signal Recovery." MIT SPAMS Seminar, March 12, 2009 (slides) (additional resources)

  3. "RNAmutants: an Algorithm for Analyzing the RNA Mutation Landscape." MIT SPAMS Seminar, October 1, 2009 (slides)

  4. "p-adic Dynamics and a Very Special Power Series." MIT SPAMS Seminar, September 16, 2010 (slides)

  5. "Spectral Sparsification in the Semi-Streaming Setting." Pure Math Graduate Student Seminar, October 22, 2010. (slides)

Funding

My work has been generously funded by the Liberty Mutual Insurance Company/Boston Foundation and the MIT Applied Mathematics Fellowship. Currently, I am supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. All views expressed on this website are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the organizations listed above.

Contact

Email: (my last name) AT-SIGN mit DOT edu

Postal:
Department of Mathematics, 2-342
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139