Kadar He is moving on to the PhD program at the CUNY's GC

Congratulations to Kadar He, who completed his Master's degree in Mathematics this Spring and will be entering the mathematics PhD program at the CUNY Graduate Center starting in the Fall.

Hear about it in Kadar's own words:

I never loved math. It was probably my favorite subject in school, but I didn’t like school, so I didn’t like math. Plus, the courses I’d taken had been heavily computational, and while I did okay in them, I had no intention of continuing this, and even less so in a formal environment. It was merely an obligation for my next degree, and so in college, I was more focused on my extracurricular pursuits and finding myself as a person, whatever that meant.

It was a failure. I took design courses, joined all the campus clubs and got all the jobs I could find. I never found myself, however. It’s pretty tough to find something when you don’t know what you’re looking for, when, where, how to do it, and can barely verbalize why.

I started exploring math a little bit more during the pandemic. After no longer having it in my day-to-day, I realized that I took its presence for granted, that there was a part of me asking for more. So I picked up a real analysis text and learned about continuity, metric spaces, convergence. It was fascinating, and elegant. I also wanted to learn abstract algebra, which felt alien at the time. Was it even math? Where were the equations?

I enrolled at CCNY to give this a try. In my first year, I attended a lecture by Professor Dennis Sullivan from the CUNY Graduate Center. He talked about 3D geometrization, which is (clearly) important. But what stood out to me was that, by lecture’s end, the board was filled with little pictures, arrows, diagrams. There were few formal definitions, Greek symbols, no essays of text. You could feel the language he was using, what each concept was meant to represent, why it was chosen, and how they all connected like a tapestry. He played with the ideas, putting them together in original ways. It was artistic, conceptual, and as intuitive as a piece of novel mathematics could be. “This is math?!” I was incredulous that this is how one of the great mathematicians of our time operated. In that moment, I had crossed the Rubicon, and decided I needed to formally participate in this great fun.

Mathematics is traditionally a young person’s game. In the past, I’ve wondered if some were fed formula(s) that gave them brilliant insights from birth. But those of us who find their interest a little later—at the ripe old age of post-undergrad—it’s nice to have a chance, too. Are we going to be Galois? Probably not. But neither are you, and in some ways, maybe that’s best for everyone involved.

CCNY gave me that opportunity. It wasn’t easy the whole time—I failed exams, stared at theorems until my vision switched off, and yes, even threw Artin and Munkres across the room at least five times (each). Some problems were grueling, and much of it was technical and symbol-heavy, unlike the style of Sullivan’s lecture. And of course—drill work is necessary. But this is all part of the charm of the experience, and I can thank Professors Gautam Chinta, Eli Amzallag, and Sergiy Merenkov for being my drillmasters. The times I banged my head against the wall were worthwhile, giving me the foundational tools with which I can now use to play and draw little pictures. I also have two years’ worth of courses to transfer into the Ph.D. program at the Graduate Center.

A few months ago, Sullivan taught me that he subcategorized math into concepts, computations, and pictures. It clicked for me. I’d been missing two of these components over the course of my entire math career! I couldn’t verbalize it at that time, of course, but this is what I was always looking for. I’ve done some proverbial homecoming here, solving my original longing.

As for finding myself as a person, that is still an ongoing project.

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