Here’s a list of things I’ve written for an academic audience. Papers are listed chronologically, oldest to newest.

“If you find any paper below hard to read, write to me [1], as that means the paper is poorly written, not that the result is hard.” – Boris Bukh

[MPW+24] – Cole Mathis, Devansh Patel, Westley Weimer, Stephanie Forrest, Self-organization in computation and chemistry: Return to AlChemy, 2024, Chaos 34 (9), pdf, doi

TLDR: Generate a giant set of expressions in the lambda calculus (a simple functional programming language). Take two out. Compose and reduce (evaluate) them. Return the composed expression and one parent back into the set. Repeat a bazillion times. Do you observe anything interesting? Are there theoretical implications for certain types of chemistries?

[Vim25] – Devansh Vimal, Planarity of Mycielski-like graph expansions, 2025, arXiv preprint, pdf

TLDR (non-math): OK, this one is really cool. Charlieplexing is a neat little method of reading inputs from a lot of switches using relatively few microcontroller pins. Charlieplexed circuits can be transformed into ‘power saving’ circuits by adding a few interrupt lines. The transformation of an ordinary charlieplex circuit to the power-saving circuit might make the power-saving circuit unroutable on a single-sided PCB (i.e. non-planar). Here, I characterize all charlieplex circuits for which the power-saving circuits are planar. Turns out that this is the set of all bipartite cactus graphs.

I discovered this result after trying much too hard to save $1 off of a PCB order by making my PCB single-sided. The PCB was for heartstopper, a tiny mechanical keyboard.

TLDR (math): Let G be a graph, and let S(G) be a transformation of this graph such that for each vertex v of G, there is a vertex v’ connected to v and all neighbors of v. Then S(G) is planar if and only if G is a bipartite cactus.

The transformation S(G) is similar to Mycielski’s operation. Structural graph theory problems like this do not often have a clean characterization, so this is a cute result.

[VMW+25] – Devansh Vimal, Cole Mathis, Westley Weimer, Stephanie Forrest, Prebiotic Functional Programming: Endogenous Selection in an Artifical Chemistry, 2025, ALIFE (to appear)

TLDR: A pseudo-follow-up to [MPW+24]. In [MPW+24], the lambda calculus expressions act sort of like organisms, and composition sort of acts like a crossover operator. Hey, that’s all you need for evolution! Now let’s play god: can we add special organisms (carefully constructed combinators) into the system such that we force the evolution of desirable lambda calculus expressions?

(You can, but good results take up a lot of reductions. Luckily, we wrote a very parallel lambda calculus reduction machine in rust.)

[VPS+25] – Devansh Vimal, Garrett Parzych, Olivia M. Smith, Devendra Parkar and Sean Bergen, Joshua J. Daymude, Cole Mathis, Open, Reproducible Calculation of Assembly Indices, 2025, arXiv preprint, pdf, git

TLDR: There’s a graph-theoretic measure of molecular complexity called the assembly index of a molecule. It’s controversial among people doing space chemistry stuff. Worse still, it’s #P-complete. Let’s try to compute it really fast anyway. And we’ll make it open-source, because proprietary software = bad.

[1] in this case, “me” = me, not Boris