ESP Biography



LYMAN HURD, MIT alum, math enthusiast, software engineer



Major: 18

College/Employer: MIT

Year of Graduation: 83

Picture of Lyman Hurd

Brief Biographical Sketch:

Teaching for ESP and HSSP was one of my favorite parts of being an MIT undergrad. I went on to earn a PhD in mathematics from Princeton and spent years as a math professor before shifting into tech as a software engineer at companies including Google. I love sharing the fun side of math—especially combinatorial games, puzzles, and the theory of computation—showing students how playful exploration connects to deep ideas.



Past Classes

  (Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

M16460: The Mathematics of Games in Spark 2026 (Mar. 14 - 15, 2026)
This course gives an introduction to world's simplest non-trivial game, nim, and explains some of the fascinating mathematics behind it. We will discuss representing numbers in binary including the ability to do this in one's head and a new way of adding unique to games.


M16155: Mathematics of Games in Splash Spring 2025 (Mar. 15 - 16, 2025)
A hands-on introduction to mathematical games via the games Nim and Wythoff's Nim. We willl touch upon what it means to "add" two games and what a "number" is while we learn optimal strategies for simple to define yet not trivial to analyze games.


C15932: Computing in the Small in HSSP Spring 2024 (Mar. 02, 2024)
The theory of computation centers on simple to describe systems with complex behavior. In this course we will talk about a number of systems from Turing Machines to Cellular Automata \, how they work and why they can potentially compute anything that a regular computer can achieve. We will explore these systems using a variety of techniques including implementing in Python.