courses
Discrete math at UChicago (CMSC 27100) was the first proof-based class I took. It definitely was very new at first, so I compiled my notes in an effort to review.
This class (STAT 24410) is just a standard intro statistical theory class, which I took with Prof. Dan Nicolae. It was a great class! As of March 2026 it was probably my favorite so far at UChicago; the lectures were great and the content was all quite interesting.
These are my handwritten notes from the course. I haven’t reviewed them so beware of errors!
I wasn’t really sure what to expect going into this class, but it was super interesting. There was a learning curve getting used to the proof techniques and the attacker advantage analysis, but I felt like I learned a lot.
We used Mike Rosulek’s 2026 “Joy of Cryptography” textbook (JoC), which was so new that it wasn’t even published by the first day of the course! I haven’t read the standard crypto textbook (Kats & Lindell), but from what I’ve heard, JoC’s library notation simplifies many proofs by leaving a lot of the heavy lifting to the notation itself. This also makes the notation somewhat hard to parse at first, but it is quite cool how naturally many of the results fall out of definitions.
These notes are handwritten, and while I’ve checked over them two times, there could be errors (and almost definitely are incomplete thoughts throughout)!