Overview

I am an M.S. student at Cornell University studying Computer Science, specifically algorithms and CS theory. I completed my undergrad at Cornell in Math and CS. I am interested in networks, graph algorithms, randomized algorithms, and cryptography (and other stuff too!). Here is a link to my resume.

Outside of schoolwork, I am a rock climbing, caving, and tree climbing instructor for Cornell Outdoor Education! I also guided Outdoor Odyssey trips for incoming freshmen.

Email: sylvan.martin@gmail.com

Sometimes I find out a good way of explaining a concept to myself, or I figure out how to do something I couldn’t find a good tutorial online for and I’m worried I’ll forget how to do it later, so I write up a small explainer for myself. But, it occurred to me that these might also be helpful to other people, so I figured I’d put them on here, which is what’s happening in the tutorials/writeups section. If anyone finds these useful, that’s amazing!

Projects

Here are some of the things I’ve worked on either in the past, or am working on currently! Click on the name of any project to be taken to the GitHub site. If you want a brief discussion of the project rather than just reading the whole GitHub, go to the projects page!

• ml_kit: A work-in-progress machine learning library for Rust, in collaboration with Owen Wetherbee and Ethan Ma
• rusty_crypto: A post-quantum cryptographic suite written in Rust
• algebra_kit: An abstract algebra library for Rust
• matrix_kit: An abstract linear algebra library for Rust (sensing a pattern here?)
• Ocaml ECC: Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Helman in OCaml
• BigNumber: A performance based big-integer library for Swift

There are many more but these are just some of my favorites.

Tutorials and Writeups

As I’m working on new projects, there are certain problems I run into that I realize I will need to re-solve in later projects, or that other people will run into as well. For a lot of these problems, there exists a good online tutorial already written. But, for some niche topics, I could not find a (in my opinion) well-written tutorial online that actually answered the questions I had. So, I’m writing tutorials and explainers for others and mainly for myself!

This is a work in progress and tutorials are coming soon, but these are the tutorials I intend to make soon!

Machine Learning

My group for the ml_kit project had a meeting where we worked out the math for backpropagation together. The notes of which can be found here under March 5th.

Cryptography

See the cryptography page for an explanation of the Learning With Errors cryptosystem.

Miscellaneous

• Calling (Asynchronous!) Rust Code from C and Swift
  • This one is hard, and I’m still working on a tutorial.
• Implementing Big Number Division

Rock Climbing

And here is where you can see cool rock climbing stuff!