about

Hello! I’m Aaratrick¹, and I’m a first year PhD student at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. I got my undergraduate degree (Bachelor of Mathematics) from the Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore. I am grateful to have had a wonderful peer group along with amazing instructors at ISI, for I would not know nearly half of the math I do currently without the people there! My mathematical interests lie at the intersection of geometry and topology; more specifically, I am interested in learning more about mapping class groups, hyperbolic manifolds and Teichmüller theory. I love discussing about whatever topic I am studying at the moment, and was fortunate to have had several opportunitities to give talks as an undergrad about some of them; some notes and slides can be found here. You can find more about my academics on this page.

When I’m not thinking about math, you can probably find me tinkering with my dotfiles. I was an avid reader during my high school days, and am slowly getting back into that as well; I mostly read fiction (mainly crime and fantasy) and occasionally also poetry. I’m a big fan of jazz, Western classical and rock music, and I firmly believe in the following quote by Rényi,

A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.