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Dongming (Merrick) Hua
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Dongming (Merrick) Hua

Hi, my name is Merrick!* I am a second year math graduate student at Caltech, where I have the good fortune of being advised by Antoine Song. Before Caltech, I received my B.S. in mathematics from the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara. My mathematical interests lie in geometric analysis, as well as convex and high-dimensional geometry.

I have recently become interested in AI governance and safety, with a current focus on compute verification. I am co-organizing a reading group on general topics in AI safety in the math department; if you are interested, please reach out!

My email is dhua[at]caltech[dot]edu. A copy of my CV can be found here (last updated Oct 2026).

Here is a news article about my work on Talagrand's "creating convexity" conjecture, joint with Antoine Song and Stefan Tudose. Do note that the preprint has been significantly updated since the writing of this article.

*I publish under the name Dongming (Merrick) Hua.


Publications and Preprints

  1. On Talagrand's Convexity Conjecture, with Antoine Song and Stefan Tudose.
    Preprint. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10908. (News)

Pre-Graduate Work

  1. Volume Entropy Rigidity for Random Groups at Low Densities.
    Preprint. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23364.
  2. Extremal hypergraphs for the Erdős-Selfridge theorem using labelings of binary trees, with Kathryn Grossmann, Benjamin Pagano, Hannah Sheats, Eric Sundberg, Ann Thompson, and Sireesh Vinnakota.
    Involve, a Journal of Mathematics, 17(5), 845–899 (2024). DOI: https://doi.org/10.2140/involve.2024.17.845.
  3. Local behavior of the Eden model on graphs and tessellations of manifolds, with Fedor Manin, Tahda Queer, and Tianyi Wang.
    J Appl. and Comput. Topology, 8, 1607–1647 (2024). https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.14146.

Caltech (Teaching Assistantships)

  • Math 1a, Calculus of One and Several Variables and Linear Algebra. Fall 2026.
  • Math 1c Analytical, Calculus of One and Several Variables and Linear Algebra. Spring 2026.
  • Math 3, Introduction to Probability and Statistics. Winter 2026.
  • Math 1a, Calculus of One and Several Variables and Linear Algebra. Fall 2025.