Hobbies
go, books

Clubs
math, physics, and computer science organizations, tj's computer systems lab admin.

Experience
gold medal at ipho '05, amc/aime/usamo, and usaco gold div.

Biography
I was born in Seoul, Korea in '88, and my childhood isn't particularly interesting except for being a moderately bright child. Life gets more interesting in March '00 when I move to the United States, originally just because of my father's job but then pretty soon to stay for good. As is the case with many middle-school children, my experience with math/physics-y stuff starts with Mathcounts, which was interesting. Then high school started, and generally I was involved with doing these various math (and computer) contests such as the usamo. Sometime in my sophomore year, I found out about this physics olympiad business, and I guess I was pretty happy with being a semifinalist without having sat in a single day of physics class which happened the next (junior) year. Before the junior year, I spent the summer at the Ross maths program where I acquired a love for number theory and algebra, along with a very clear bias for platonism. I was invited to be part of the team last year, and around this time of that last year, for a couple of months there was much drama and angst having to do with the entire story of the various issues and whatnot involved with the physics team/olympiad which I am not prepared to discuss here, but when the dust finally settled and all was done and said, I came away with a nice gold medal from the ipho, and a very interesting experience as a whole. This year, my life has been consumed by a couple of little research projects, one involving prolog and language, another with groups and games, along with generally spending a lot of time at my school's computer systems lab doing lots of little things. Now that I've cooked up this little biography, I'm going back to making a little headway in _Read to Reality_ (my current preoccupation), a really good physics book that starts out talking about pythagoras' theorem.