Luis M. B. Varona
I am a fifth-year Bachelor of Arts student at Mount Allison University in Sackville, NB, graduating in May 2027 with a triple major in Mathematics (Hons.), Political Science, and Computer Science & Economics. Over the past three and a half years, I have conducted research with faculty supervisors in all four disciplines, encompassing (among other subfields) political philosophy, graph algorithms, neural network theory, and public finance.
My three favourite courses at Mount A thus far have been Political & Cultural Change, Real Analysis II, and Cryptography (although that may change as I head into my final year!). After finishing my undergraduate degree, I plan to pursue graduate studies in computer science and continue researching graph algorithms and/or graph structures in one form or another. I hope to eventually end up in a line of work or research related—at least tangentially so—to public policy and/or democratic governance.
My other school-adjacent hobbies/activities include competitive programming and open-source software. Additionally, I have worked on (non-academic) accessibility policy research with the Government of New Brunswick’s Accessibility Office, particularly in the education sector. Outside of research and academics, I love cats, reading, travelling, and searching for bears in the woods.
Two of my family's cats, Ash (top) and Yuki, both sleeping.
Important Milestones
- (2026-05) I officially complete my math honours thesis with Dr. Johnston (a year before graduation)
- (2026-04) Dr. Wayne A. Hunt asks to turn my work for his POLS 4200 seminar into a journal article, and I start my first summer of political science research (concurrently with my computer science grant)
- (2026-03) I receive a grant to conduct an independent computer science research project of my choosing (namely, my RNN project) for the summer
- (2026-03) I speak again at AUPAC on heuristic algorithms for decomposing quantum states (and an MtA professor gets over 50 people to sing “Happy Birthday” to me at the banquet)
- (2026-02) I post A polynomial-time algorithm for recognizing high-bandwidth graphs on the arXiv (currently under review at Discrete Applied Mathematics)
- (2026-01) I post Efficient spectral bounds on the chromatic number of Hamming, Johnson, and Kneser graph powers on the arXiv (currently under review at the Rose-Hulman Undergraduate Mathematics Journal) with fellow undergrad Finn Steinke (introduced to me by one of the other Computer Cats)
- (2025-12) MatrixBandwidth.jl is successfully peer-reviewed and published in the Journal of Open Source Software
- (2025-10) My competitive programming team, the MtA Computer Cats, wins 3rd Place at the Atlantic Canada Programming Competition
- (2025-10) I return to Science Atlantic MSCS to give a talk on combinatorial graph algorithms, winning the 2nd Place Undergraduate Research Award for Computer Science
- (2025-09) Dr. Craig Brett hires me to do part-time economics research in the Fall term
- (2025-07) Dr. Johnston, Dr. Plosker, my friend Charles Torrance, and I post Generalizing the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality: Hadamard powers and tensor products on the arXiv (currently under review at Linear and Multilinear Algebra)
- (2025-06) I begin work on a scientific computing package in Julia called MatrixBandwidth.jl for matrix/graph bandwidth reduction algorithms
- (2025-05) The same summer, I concurrently work as a Student Researcher for the Government of New Brunswick’s Accessibility Office, looking into education policy and legislation
- (2025-05) I return to do math research with Dr. Johnston for the summer
- (2025-02) I present at the Atlantic Undergraduate Physics and Astronomy Conference (AUPAC) on a similar vein of quantum computing research
- (2024-10) I present at the Science Atlantic Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science (MSCS) Conference on quantum information theory
- (2024-04) I start my first summer of math research with Drs. Nathaniel Johnston and Sarah Plosker
- (2022-09) I begin my Bachelor of Arts degree at Mount Allison University in the PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) program (which I later switch out of into my current program)