About Me
Hello! My name is Raymond Matson and I recently earned my PhD in Mathematics from the University of California, Riverside under the supervision of professor Peter Samuelson. My research interests lie at the intersection of quantum representation theory and low-dimensional topology. Specifically, I study stated skein algebras and how they interact and connect with double affine Hecke algebras.
Prior to joining UC Riverside, I received my Bachelors of Science in Mathematics at UC Davis in 2017. During my time there I studied pursuit-evasion on graphs under the guidance of Dr. Erik Slivken.
In between degrees I worked for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise under Aruba Networks' R&D division. During these couple years I had hands-on experience with systems engineering, regularly using resources such as Telnet/Putty, VMWare, ESXi, MySQL, and Ixia while working in RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu, Windows, Cisco IOS, H3C, ArubaOS, and ProCurve environments. I gained lots of experience with many programming languages such as C, C++, Tcl, Perl, Java, Python, and a bit of experience in ASM. Fun fact - my unbelievably nice boss from HPE, Tim Twietmeyer, is a famous ultramarathon runner.
Outside of math, I typically fill up my spare time by playing guitar or composing songs. For any fellow guitar enthusiasts, I own two Ibanez guitars (one is an s series and the other a black knight), an LTD deluxe ec-1000, and an acoustic Gretsch 3700, which I undoubtedly seem to favor.
Once upon a time in high school a couple friends and I started a metal band, in which I played guitar. In order to maintain a minimal amount of embarrassment links will not be provided (although I'm sure if you crawl around the internet long enough you can figure it out). I still enjoy jamming with friends occasionally, although, these days I usually just write and play in my room. If anyone ever wants to talk music (bands, gear, writing, sound engineering, etc.) I'm always available.
Since music is such a big part of my life I'm always interested in attending concerts. The following is a picture I took of the massive choir at the 2018 Latvian Song and Dance Festival (Dziesmu un Deju svētki). This was easily the most impactful musical event I've ever attended. Approximately 16,000 singers performed in this choir, making up about a quarter of the entire stadium that night. You can listen to one of their beautiful performances here.