Julius Zhang

Ph.D. student, Computer Science
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University

I am a first year Ph.D. student working with Michael Walfish, doing research at the intersection of systems, security, and verifiable computation.

I am visiting the Department of Mathematics at Columbia University, where I am hosted by Andrew Blumberg.

I received a B.A. in Mathematics and an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, where I did research in algebraic geometry and geometric topology and worked on distributed systems. I also have substantial background in optimization, applied statistics, and quantitative modeling.

I write a technical blog on mathematics and computer science as I figure things out.

Outside of research, I like to do judo and sketch in art galleries – a habit from my teenage years in London, when I volunteered at the National Portrait Gallery by Trafalgar Square. I am yondan in Go.

CV · Scholar · GitHub · Blog

60 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10011

julius.z (at) nyu (dot) edu

Publications and Manuscripts

The relative trace-zero subgroup of the Barreto-Naehrig curves

Julius Zhang

Cryptology ePrint Archive, 2026.

paper
Spain: Succinct proofs for numerical computations

Zachary DeStefano, Noah Golub, Zile Huang, Julius Zhang, Sam Frank, and Michael Walfish

20th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2026), Seattle, WA, July 2026.

paper code
Complex cobordism and formal group law

Julius Zhang

Undergraduate honours thesis advised by Mohammed Abouzaid, Stanford University, 2024.

thesis

Talks

p-ordinary cohomology for SL(2) over number fields Hida Theory Seminar, Columbia University, 2026.
Construction of Seiberg-Witten-Floer stable homotopy types Homotopy Theory and Manifolds Seminar, Columbia University, 2026.
Bordered Heegaard Floer homology and the surgery exact triangle Stanford University, 2022.
Knots, links, and the search for exotic 4-spheres Stanford University, 2021.

Notes

Two-step ADMM denoising with cached Cholesky factors Fast image denoising via convex optimization. Final project for CS348K, Visual Computing Systems, Stanford University, Spring 2024. pdf code
Space of self-dual connections of instanton number 1 Expository notes from a reading course on instanton Floer homology with Ciprian Manolescu at Stanford, 2022. pdf

Recent writing

Aug 2026 Sinkhorn iteration as alternating minimization of generalized KL divergence
Jun 2026 Consensus is a sheaf condition
Jun 2026 Deriving concrete parameters from DARK

All posts →

Teaching

Course Assistant, CS244B, Distributed Systems, Stanford University, Spring 2024.