Janet Chen

Harvard Math Department
1 Oxford St
Cambridge, MA 02138

I was an undergraduate at Stanford University, where I double majored in math and computer science. After graduating in 2001, I came to Harvard University, where I am now a Ph.D. student in the math department. I am studying automorphic forms, and my advisor is Wilfried Schmid. I have two fabulous cats, Buddha and Otto.

Past Projects

• Here is my minor thesis about the Weil Converse Theorem, written in January 2002.
• In my senior year at Stanford (2000 - 2001), I wrote an honors thesis about the conjectured order of the Tate-Shafarevich group for families of quadratic twists. My advisor for this project was Karl Rubin.
• In the summer of 1998, Susan Morey, Anne Sung, and I studied prime ideals associated to powers of the edge ideals of graphs.

College Teaching

• I'm currently teaching Math 21b: Linear Algebra and Differential Equations.
• In spring 2005, I was the TF for Math 123: Abstract Algebra II and the CA for Math E-301: Theory and Practice of Teaching Number Theory
• In fall 2004, I taught Math 21b: Linear Algebra and Differential Equations.
• In fall 2003, I taught Math 1b: Calculus, Series, and Differential Equations.
• In spring 2003, I was the course assistant for Math 251r: Arithmetic Theory of Quadratic Forms.
• As an undergraduate, I spent 8 quarters as a section leader for the introductory computer science courses at Stanford (CS 106A, CS 106B, and CS 106X).

Other Teaching

Since 2002, I have been giving colloquium talks at the Honors Summer Math Camp at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. This is a six-week program for high school students; first-year students focus on elementary number theory while returning students take other classes such as analysis, algebra, and topology. (I attended this program myself while in high school and highly recommend it.) Here is a list of my past colloquium topics.

• 2002: "The Congruent Number Problem"
• 2003: "Infinity -- To Omega and Beyond"
• 2004: "Fractals" (I have put up a gallery of some images I used in my talk.)

In 2004, I also taught a 2-week short course about group theory and the Rubik's cube for the second- and third-year students.

• Here are notes for the course. They are still somewhat rough, so please email me if you find mistakes or have suggestions about the presentation.

In 2005, I am teaching a 3-week short course about group theory for second- and third-year students. I hope to cover the first isomorphism theorem and Cayley's Theorem.

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