Timothy G. Abbott tabbott@mit.edu (703)-859-1830 32 Vassar Street #32G-678 Cambridge, MA 02139

You've reached Tim Abbott's homepage. I have bachelor's degrees in mathematics and physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I'm attending graduate school in computer science at MIT, with research interests centered around algorithms 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. To appear at 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 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

Software Projects

1. I packaged SAGE and some 26 libraries and other mathematical software that it depends on for Debian.
2. I started 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.
3. config-package-dev, a set of CDBS modules created by Anders Kaseorg and I for efficiently creating Debian configuration packages.
4. nss_nonlocal, an NSS module created by Anders Kaseorg and I that protects nonlocal accounts from getting access to local credentials.
5. pam_mktemp, a PAM module I wrote to create temporary files and set an environment variable to point to them.
6. Linerva, SIPB's answer to the Athena dialup service, athena.dialup.mit.edu.
   
7. scripts.mit.edu, A SIPB Project for providing a secure environment for running CGI scripts out of AFS.
8. Project Numenor, a collaboration of (bored) MIT students to build a distributed computing system.
   

Organizations

I've been involved with the following MIT organizations:
Debian, the place where I submit my bugs
MIT, the place where I take my classes.
CSAIL, the Labratory where I do my research.
Random Hall, my former home.
The Harvard-MIT Math Tournament, a contest for high school students run entirely by Harvard and MIT students.
Maslab, a student-run IAP robotics competition course (6.186) focused on autonomous, vision-based robots navigating an unknown playing area.
SIPB, MIT's Student Information Processing Board, where I work on many of my recreational computing projects.
LSC, an organization that shows movies in MIT lecture halls, and uses the profits to fund lectures at MIT.
MIT Undergraduate Math Association.
MIT Algorithmic Open Problem Session.
MIT Mystery Hunt.
mitBEEF, an MIT beef club that is amazingly popular among former USACO finalists.

I've held various positions within these organizations, with the pinnacle roles being the Chief of Staff of HMMT, Technical Director of Maslab, Chairman of SIPB, Founder of Project Numenor, and Figurehead "President" of the MIT Mystery Hunt. I've served on the executive committees of LSC, mitBEEF, and the UMA as well. For a more informative accounting of when exactly I was doing what, I've tried to record this information here. Warning: it is horrifically formatted.

News

Ancient History

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)

Useful Resources:
John Scholes' Math Olympiad site
Mathworld
USACO Training Pages
Reid's Random Stuff
An efficient way to access MIT course homepages
 

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

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