ESP Biography



LYMAN HURD, Former MIT alum and former math professor



Major: 18

College/Employer: MIT

Year of Graduation: 83

Picture of Lyman Hurd

Brief Biographical Sketch:

While at MIT, I was a frequent contributor to HSSP and related ESP programs. After graduating, I received a PhD (math) from Princeton and worked as a math professor util switching careers and am now a software developer at companies including Google. My favorite topics are in mathematics especially games and puzzles with a particular fondness for the theory of computation.



Past Classes

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

M16155: Mathematics of Games in Splash 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.