Math & CS @ Pomona College Β· SΓ i GΓ²n β Claremont, CA Β· Vietnamese / English
I'm a sophomore at Pomona College studying Math and Computer Science β which is honestly just a fancy way of saying I enjoy making things complicated before figuring out how to optimize them.
I jump around a little bit of pure math, a fair amount of optimization and AI/ML, and a lot of wiring up robotics (and hoping they don't break down). Mostly, I'm interested in to see how machines perceive the world and how to make them do it faster.
When I'm not proving theorems or desperately debugging code, I'm probably out running, traveling, taking underexposed photos, or wandering around looking for my next adventure. (more at hafuong.com)
- Sparse signal recovery over finite abelian groups β derived a closed-form functional for the Direct Rounding Algorithm's exact worst-case error, replacing brute-force enumeration of 2α΄Ί candidates with polynomial-time evaluation; sole author of the resulting paper Β· Vietnam Polymath REU
- Pho-Around β an itinerary planner that models an afternoon as a prize-collecting TSP, solves it as a mixed-integer program, and wraps it in a bilingual natural-language layer Β· solo, live
- RAG pipelines end-to-end β document chunking, embeddings, vector retrieval, and prompt construction, evaluated against a no-retrieval baseline Β· Break Through Tech AI
- Teaching the math behind ML β designing the linear algebra & convex optimization curriculum for a Math-for-ML track, from inner products to the SVM dual Β· PiMA
Languages Β
ML & LLM Β
Web, Cloud & Tools Β
| Project | What it does | Stack |
|---|---|---|
| Pho-Around Β· live demo | Models an afternoon itinerary as a prize-collecting TSP, solves it as a mixed-integer program under hard time/budget constraints (<4s over 100 places), and adds a bilingual LLM layer that only emits schema-validated constraints β never picks the stops itself | Python, PuLP/CBC, FastAPI, React, Google Maps APIs |
| P-resents Β· live demo | Bipartite matching with exclusion constraints to generate valid gift-exchange assignments over group graphs β cut a manual process by ~90% | Python, Next.js, Tailwind |
| Ham ChΖ‘i Β· site | A small web home for the film rolls I shoot β scans, captions, and the stories between frames | HTML, CSS, JavaScript |
- Exact worst-case error for the Direct Rounding Algorithm (sole author, 2026) β a closed-form predictor validated to exact agreement with brute-force ground truth on 34/34 test sets; disproves a number-theoretic conjecture on which frequencies are safe to lose, with reproducible scripts.
- AI Ouroboros: modeling model collapse β SCUDEM (SIMIODE) differential-equations challenge, Outstanding Award (top 20%): a DE model of AI trained on synthetic data, simulating degradation over 100+ epochs.
I care a lot about bringing math and AI education to more people β especially back home.
- Academic Mentor, PiMA β built the linear-algebra-to-SVM-dual curriculum for a Math-for-ML track and mentor a student research team through Lagrange multipliers, KKT conditions, and the kernel trick, from problem formulation to final paper.
- Teaching Assistant, CS 51 (Intro CS), Pomona β ran small-group mentor sessions for 30β40 students and debugged logic with them in real time, live.
- Always up for community outreach that brings AI education to local students and tech-for-good projects.
Open to research collaborations, community projects, or just a good excuse to yap about optimization, math, and AI/ML.