Welcome to eagankaminetz.com!

Hello, my name is Eagan Kaminetz. I'm currently an applied math masters student at UC San Diego, and I will graduate in June 2026. In June 2025, I earned my B.S. in Mathematics-Computer Science from UCSD, where I graduated with honors with highest distinction. I was also an intern at BAE Systems, Inc. from June 2023 to September 2024.

Academically, I'm primarily interested in analysis, probability, numerical linear algebra, and discrete mathematics. I especially like areas where several of these intersect, such as the probabilistic method, probabilistic algorithms, scientific machine learning, and the mathematics of data science.

As for research, in my undergraduate honors thesis (available here), I discovered a relationship between two types of factored positive definite matrix approximations, namely partial pivoted Cholesky (also known as Column Nystrom) and Vecchia approximations, and used it to propose an algorithm combining the approaches with impressive empirical performance. A manuscript soon to appear on arXiv expands on the theory of the combined approximation and shows it outperforms current state-of-the-art low-rank approaches when applied to preconditioned conjugate gradient on Gaussian kernel matrices, in many cases for essentially no additional cost. This project has potential impacts in many fields considering the ubiquity of positive definite matrices, but we expect it will be particularly useful in fields making heavy use of Gaussian processes for scientific machine learning, such as ocean or atmospheric science. My advisor is Robert Webber.

Outside of school or work, I'm an avid linux user who spends a reasonable amount of time tinkering with configurations, dotfiles, etc. In fact, this whole website is generated from org-mode files using emacs. I also sometimes participate in game jams/hackathons, but I'm not particularly proud of the code I produce under these circumstances (you can probably find it if you try really hard though). My less employable hobbies include playing board/tabletop games and surfing.

This site contains a few articles I've written on various topics that interest me, ranging from mathematical finance approaches for personal investing to mundane desktop linux guides.

You can contact me at ekaminetz@ucsd.edu for academic-related emails, or eagangk@protonmail.com for anything else.