David Stephens

Here you can find my honors thesis Open PDF. This was a project suggested by Professor Bryna Kra (Northwestern) and supervised by Professor Brandon Seward (UC San Diego) in ergodic theory. It received Honors with High Distinction. Professor Kra suggested the project so that I could learn more about additive combinatorics and its connections to ergodic theory using progressive measures.

Here you can find the paper from the REU I did at UCLA in 2025 with Dr. Vijay Higgins, Brian Silva, Amy Somers, Srijan Sundar, and Parth Wokhlu. The project was organized by Professor Ko Honda and Vijay. Our project was on PGL_2 webs and finding central elements of the skein algebra. We generalized transparency results on simpler skein algebras and also studied the PGL_2 Frobenius homomorphism.