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— mathematician · builder · Edinburgh
Adithya
Kumar
I start before I know how. At sixteen that meant cold-emailing fifty professors because school was too slow. At twenty it meant soldering hardware I've never touched.
Work
Descrai v3: Lab Intelligence
50% of published research is irreproducible because the raw process data is never captured. Descrai v3 is a VLA pipeline that takes experimental notes and verifies protocol adherence in real time. To get it into labs, we built smart safety glasses — giving the system eyes and ears at the bench.
Lasserre Hierarchies for MAX-CUT
Dissertation: derived and compared Lasserre SDP relaxation hierarchies across multiple MAX-CUT formulations, examining how tightly successive levels bound the optimum and where formulations diverge in quality and cost.
eGates Queue Simulation
Modelled immigration queuing dynamics at an international airport using queuing theory. Treating passenger flow as a continuous fluid rather than discrete events cut computational cost without losing the dynamics that determined throughput.
Only undergraduate entrant among 100+ postgraduate research teams
About
I've never started anything I already knew how to do.
My dissertation is on the Lasserre hierarchy: SDP relaxations for NP-hard combinatorial problems, applied to Max Cut. The maths is at the edge of algebra, geometry, and computational complexity.
At sixteen I cold-emailed fifty professors to learn mathematics my school didn't teach. Five replied. Two ran weekly sessions for two years — group theory, Galois theory.
I build Descrai on my bedroom floor — soldering components, 3D-printing enclosures, borrowing time in engineering labs I wasn't supposed to be in. I learned hardware because the problem required it. Prototypes are in labs.
Recognition
SIAM–IMA Modelling Competition 2023 — Third Prize
Only undergraduate finalist; all others were PhD researchers.
Edinburgh Startup Accelerator 2025 — 1st Place
Selected from 100+ applications, 13 companies competed.
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