Ryan Pham ’26 gives a talk at the University of Chicago about his summer research in topology and computer science with Prof. Ben StuckyRyan Pham (’26) stepped into the spotlight at the Midstates Consortium for Math and Science Undergraduate Research Symposium in the Physical Sciences, Math, and Computer Science held November 7-8, 2025 at the University of Chicago, presenting his recent summer research. His talk, titled “Reducing the Pinning Problem to a variant of Boolean Satisfiability,” detailed the challenging work he undertook as a student researcher.

The project was a close collaboration with fellow student Alex Maule (’27) and their faculty mentor, Professor Ben Stucky of the math and computer science department. Professor Stucky expressed immense pride in his students’ work, which synthesized concepts from topology and theoretical computer science.

“I’m proud of Ryan and Alex,” Stucky said. “They both learned a lot of challenging concepts in a short time. Ryan’s code contributed significantly to ongoing work with Christopher-Lloyd Simon on the pinning problem.”

The research’s impact will continue long after the symposium. Stucky noted that the code and concepts Pham and Maule developed are foundational for a larger project, stating, “We will be able to use it in future work on our web catalog, the LooPindex.”