Timothy Good Abbott Tim Abbott, tabbott tabbott@mit.edu (703)-859-1830 35 Brookline Street #9 Cambridge, MA 02139 I have Bachelor of Science degrees in Mathematics and Physics and a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As of June 2008, I am on leave from the MIT PhD program in computer science in the Cambridge area. My research interests are in algorithms, security and cryptography.

Publications:

1. Timothy Abbott, Erik D. Demaine, Martin L. Demaine, Daniel Kane, Stefan Langerman, Jelani Nelson, Vincent Yeung: Dynamic Ham-Sandwich Cuts of Convex Polygons in the Plane. CCCG 2005.
2. Timothy Abbott, Daniel Kane, Paul Valiant: On the Complexity of Two-Player Win-Lose Games. FOCS 2005.
3. Timothy G. Abbott, Kiran S. Kedlaya, David Roe: Bounding Picard numbers of surfaces using p-adic cohomology. To appear in proceedings "Arithmetic, Geometry, and Coding Theory (AGCT-10)"
4. Timothy G. Abbott, Katherine J. Lai, Michael R. Lieberman, Eric C. Price: Browser-Based Attacks on Tor. Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET 2007).
5. Timothy G. Abbott, Zachary Abel, David Charlton, Erik D. Demaine, Martin L. Demaine, Scott D. Kominers: Hinged Dissections Exist. SOCG 2008.
6. Timothy Good Abbott: Generalizations of Kempe's Universality Theorem. Master's thesis version, based on joint work with Reid W. Barton and advised by Erik D. Demaine.

Prospective Publications

1. Timothy Abbott, Yoyo Zhou: On Dynamic Algorithms for Minimum Cut and Other Source-Sink Problems.
2. Timothy G. Abbott, Erik D. Demaine, Blaise Gassend: An Infinitesimal Carpentar's Rule Theorem for Self-Touching Linkages.

Awards

• The MIT Akamai Presidential Graduate Fellowship
• The 2007 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
• The Machtey Award for Best Student Paper at FOCS 2005
• Tied for 7th place and 9th place on the 2004 and 2006 Putnam exams, respectively
• Honorable Mention (ranked 26-75) on the 2003, 2005 Putnam exams
• A Silver Medal at the 2003 International Olympiad in Informatics
• A Bronze Medal at the 2003 Central European Olympiad in Informatics
• A Silver Award at the 2003 Asian Pacific Math Olympiad
• Honorable Mention (ranked 13-25), USA Math Olympiad 2002, 2003

Software Projects

• I packaged for Debian Sage and 20 of its dependencies. This was a lot of work (I was told that I needed to find 5 or 6 experienced packagers to make this happen), but working with the Sage community was a lot of fun, and having an email I sent quoted in a plenary talk at an academic conference was pretty cool.
• I started and led Debian-Athena, a port of Athena and all its useful software to Debian, with a number of enhancements. Anders Kaseorg and I ran a distribution on top of Debian and Ubuntu installed on hundreds of machines across the MIT campus. Debathena is being adopted by MIT's official IT organization as Athena 10.
• I led the Linerva Project, SIPB's answer to the Athena dialup service, athena.dialup.mit.edu, for its first two years.
• I maintain config-package-dev, a set of CDBS modules created by Anders Kaseorg and I for efficiently creating Debian configuration packages.
• I organized the SIPB Virtual Servers Project until I found people with more time than me to run the project.
• Anders Kaseorg and I wrote nss_nonlocal, an NSS module that protects nonlocal accounts from getting access to local credentials.
• I wrote pam_mktemp, a PAM module to create temporary files and set an environment variable to point to them.
• I worked on scripts.mit.edu, A SIPB service providing a secure environment for running CGI scripts out of AFS that now hosts thousands of MIT sites.

Organizations

• I contribute to Debian, by submitting bugs and maintaining some packages.
• In 2005 and 2006, I ran the Harvard-MIT Math Tournament, a contest for high school students run by Harvard and MIT students.
• In 2006, I was Technical Director of Maslab, a student-run IAP robotics competition course (6.186) focused on autonomous, vision-based robots navigating an unknown playing area.
• I was Vice Chairman and then Chairman of MIT's Student Information Processing Board, the MIT computer club. I instituted a weekly series of technical talks every Fall and approximately-monthly "hackathons" to work on projects, and oversaw rearrangements of the SIPB office which resulted in a dramatic increase in its popularity as a workspace.
• In 2005, I was Secretary of the MIT Lecture Series Committee, an organization that shows movies and organizes lectures at MIT.
• In 2006, I was the (figurehead) President of the MIT Mystery Hunt.
• During college I lived in Random Hall.

News

I've been mentioned in the Tech, MIT's newspaper, occasionally. Sometimes they even failed to misquot me.

• The Tech incorrectly citing my year when I won Honorable Mention on the Putnam
• My 7th place Putnam performance
• My honorable mention while on the MIT Putnam team.
• My 9th place Putnam performance
• My taking 8 classes, except that my quote was swapped with Aron Walker's first comment, making me sound somewhat crazy.
• My unsuccessful run to be the ultimate manifestation of HardkOre at MIT.
• My Maslab Robot
• A project of mine and Anders that reversed an annoying change to the MIT phone system

Ancient History

The following are a set of (generally summer) programs that I participated in as a high school student and recommend.

• The Ross Summer Mathematics Program, a fantastic and highly rigorous summer experience for people who are (or want to be) hardcore about their mathematics.
• USA Computing Olympiad, a well-run algorithms competition for high school students.
• American Mathematics Competitions.
• Clay Math Institute Research Academy. This seems to now be defunct.
• US Physics Team.

I attended high school at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJHSST, or TJ for short). While there, I benefitted greatly from a community of peers interested in math and science, learning much of what I knew by the end of high school from them.

Academic groups at TJHSST for which I was an officer:

• TJ Varsity Math Team
• TJ Senior Computer Team
• TJ Physics Team
• The TJ USA Mathematical Olympiad training group (TJUSAMO)

My PGP Public Key (which you perhaps shouldn't trust off a website) is also available from pgp.mit.edu.

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