How I spend my time

If you ping me at a random time, you are most likely to find me sleeping or trying to sleep. I sleep because it allows me to be at my sharpest when it counts. Most of my ideas come to me when I am unsuccessfully trying to sleep, so sleep is especially important to me.

If not sleeping, I am probably spending time with my wife, Addison, and my son, Amos. Addison is my best friend, and I love her very much. We love to talk, read together, or go on little adventures to find new and interesting restaurants that are highly rated on google maps. Amos is super cute and we also have lots of fun together.

Otherwise, I'm likely thinking about physics and math. Doing physics professionally is hard work, and I love it. You might find me attending seminars, browsing papers on my phone, reading textbooks, messing around with math on a blank sheet of paper, or trying to code up some idea in mathematica. I love it when physics obeys a simple combinatorial or algebraic structure, so that I can play with small examples as if it were a new strategy game.

I also spend time walking, chilling, praying, studying the Bible, and hanging out with friends. I try to spend the least fraction of my time doing what I call "adminstrative tasks". Almost any task that must get done for the normal functioning of adult life falls into this category. I don't enjoy them much, and am not skilled at these tasks.

The last thing I'll mention is that I think a lot about education. I love to learn and teach and to optimize both. In the next 10 years, there are two projects that I want to do. The first is to start a company with the goal of broadening global access to education, especially for children who want to learn but have no opportunities. The second started with the course that I created for my physics education major in college. The course covered physics problem solving and more broadly, the ingredients for succeeding as a physics major. I want to flesh these ideas out and make them freely available.

Who Am I?

This question has many answers. 

First, I am a Christian in the very literal sense of the word: I am a big fan of Jesus Christ. If you want to know why, ask me any time.

I am a husband to Addison Longenecker, and a father to Amos!

I am a physics graduate student at Princeton University, although I actually spend most of my working time at the Institute for Advanced Study. 

I am a creative and open-minded thinker who loves to hear interesting and outrageous ideas. I am also rule-bender: I enjoy when I can find an efficient way to do ordinary tasks that goes against the conventional wisdom.

I am a third culture kid: my nationality is American but I grew up in Kuwait, in the Middle East. 

My Story

I was born in Maryland, but at the age of 5, I moved to Kuwait with my parents and sister. We moved when my dad took a job at Kuwait University teaching public health and epidemiology.

A few months after we moved to Kuwait, the US and a coalition of countries invaded Iraq. While the war did not spill over into Kuwait in any significant way, the schools in Kuwait shut down for most of the school year. So that my sister and I wouldn't lose a whole year of education, my mom decided to homeschool us. She taught first grade for 11 years before she had us, so we benefited from her extensive teaching experience. Homeschooling worked well for our family, so we continued it through elementary school and middle school. 

During middle school, I began to transition more toward online classes and self-directed study. I loved the academic freedom that came with homeschooling: being able to set my own schedule and learn without interruptions. Many people wonder about socialization, and how that worked with homeschooling. I interacted with friends primarily after school, either through extracurricular activities, or simple hanging out.

In high school, I took algebra-based physics classes in 9th and 10th grade. I enjoyed the courses, but I did not learn physics beyond the scope of the courses. By the time 11th grade rolled around, I thought that I should not take physics for a third time, as that seemed excessive to me. But by January, I realized that I missed doing physics, and so started to self-study. In 12th grade, I learned mechanics from David Morin's legendary textbook, Introduction to Classical Mechanics. The book was far above my level, and I struggled a lot. But that struggle completely reshaped how I think about physics and how I solve problems. In 12th grade, I participated in the US Physics Olympiad from Kuwait, and using the problem solving techniques I learned, I made it to the 2016 US Physics Team.

In Fall 2016, I started an undergraduate degree at Cornell University. In my freshman year, I worked very hard, and completed most of the undergraduate curriculum in physics: my freshman year was the last time I took any undergraduate-level physics or math class. I also got started on a fun research project with Professor Erich Mueller, which we published a couple years later. The downside of this intense studying was that I burned out fairly badly. I'm still trying to figure out the right balance of work and rest, to this day.

In my sophomore year, I started in on the graduate physics curriculum, and took a number of independent study courses. However, I began to wonder if I wanted to be a mathematician, and I began to itch for the kind of academic freedom that I had back in high school. So during my would-be junior year of college, I took a personal leave of absence from Cornell, packed up a suitcase of math textbooks, and traveled around Kuwait, Iceland, and Ethiopia for a year. From my experience studying math, I decided that I most enjoy doing math for the sake of physics, more than math for the sake of math, although I might have to revisit that decision sometime soon. 

I returned to the US (fall 2019) and continued my leave of absence to do research in string theory under Professor Liam McAllister. I worked on counting flux vacua, and found an unusual connection to mathematical linguistics which exactly solved the problem. Unfortunately, I never managed to implement my algorithm effectively. For various allergy-related reasons, as well as the isolation at the beginning of the pandemic, I was not very productive during this time. 

In the fall of 2020, I decided to reenroll for my third year of classes and finish my degree. This hectic academic year included applications to graduate schools, pandemic blues, coursework, getting engaged, and wedding planning. Addison and I got married in the summer and moved to Princeton, NJ. 

In August 2021, I began my PhD in physics at Princeton, and that is where I am now. I have recently begun to think about amplitudes in quantum field theory and string theory, under the guidance of Nima Arkani-Hamed, my advisor. The deep connections between math and physics in this field are astonishing and exciting, and I am looking forward to learning more.