DM

Projects

Research

Graph theory

Kaprekar convergence

Published in the September issue of Math Horizons, Mathematical Association of America.

This paper treats the four-digit Kaprekar routine as a functional graph. It replaces 9,900 admissible inputs with 54 digit-difference states, then follows the symmetries and directed paths that funnel every state toward the fixed point 6174.

I researched and wrote the paper independently, then took it through publication on my own without external help.

Code for the paper

Abolitionist history

Nature, sympathy, and abolition

Forthcoming in the Journal of Juvenilia Studies.

This paper asks how William Roscoe developed an abolitionist conscience within eighteenth-century Liverpool. It reconstructs the role of nature, poetry, family, and universal sympathy through early writings and manuscript evidence.

I wrote it in collaboration with Dr. Wiebracht of Stanford University. I worked at Liverpool Central Library to scan and archive thousands of documents, then used Node.js to graph relationships among texts and poems mathematically.

Advanced Discrete Mathematics portfolio

Open the full portfolio PDF

Education

Stanford Online High School

Graduated with a 3.9/4.0 unweighted GPA and a 1550 SAT score.

GPA: 3.9/4.0
SAT: 1550

Notable classes

Discrete mathematics
Advanced proofs
Linear algebra
Differential equations
Legal studies
Advanced Russian literature

Selected work and speech

How to Keep on Living Anyway Original fiction and analysis of grief, confession, heterotopias, and non-places in Drive My Car. Are We Forgiven Without Religion? Confession, absolution, and the limits of self-legislated moral authority. Watch my speech at Stanford

Other work experience

Translation work

Club Náutico de Águilas

Spending a large chunk of my life in rural south Spain, there wasn't much to do in the way of side gigs for high schoolers. However, there was a small boat club by the docks where I used to go on walks. In small towns like that everyone knows each other, and so I knew the guy running the place pretty well. He was struggling to translate for all the foreigners who came to him for yacht licensure, and so he asked me if I'd be willing to help out. I was 14, so I legally couldn't be employed. But he offered to repay me with lessons and a yacht licensure, and I agreed.

For years after that I translated courses for people speaking English, Polish, Czech, and even German (I have no idea how I managed, but somehow I did) to Spanish. It was a pretty spontaneous offering but it taught me so much about how to talk to people. I was a very introverted kid, but this job really forced me to get to know people and make them feel comfortable enough to trust a high schooler with their safety on really fast boats.

I talked to so many people from so many different backgrounds, everything from bankers to retired couples to rappers (pretty funny story with that one). I also spent a lot of time on the water, and even got to be crew in a small local race. I still don't have my driver's license, but I have a yacht license.

I also translated all the articles for my dad's personal journal into Spanish.

View from the deck of a sailboat at Club Náutico de Águilas

Tutoring work

Building on my work translating, for all four years of high school I had an informal tutoring business in my town. I would go around asking family friends if they needed tutoring in English or Spanish, and eventually I had 5 consistent students. Here I continued to develop a sense of what it means to provide the best possible thing you can to people. I developed Notion dashboards, multi-year curriculums, personalized exercises, and watched as the people I taught flew to new countries as they finally felt comfortable enough to speak a foreign language, apply for new jobs, and meet friends from different countries and actually engage in interesting conversations with them. It was very fulfilling, and I'm very lucky to have had this opportunity at such a young age.

Leadership experience

A fair share of my projects in my life have actually been projects of bringing people together. What's much more powerful than a singular technical project is oftentimes building a community that can construct a multitude of such projects. One instance of this was when I co-founded a computer science society in my school that worked on weekly and monthly projects. We became my school's largest and most active society, and we built things from maps to connect people at our online school to a client for our school's messaging platform that encrypted messages so our school admins couldn't see what we were getting up to. A lot of these people I worked with went on to apply to YC, got into schools like MIT and Stanford, and are just involved in really cool things now!

School messaging client on GitHub

Another such community I solo founded was my school's female student alliance. Tech and just so much of STEM is still a huge boy's club. I saw so many guys in my school get ridiculously ahead because they had a tendency to form these communities of bros that were unfortunately (from direct experience) very misogynistic. We had an informal USACO team and it was all guys who made any interested woman VERY uncomfortable. To solve this issue I started a society that uplifted the girls in my school. We ran workshops, held informal hackathons, and referred each other to internships and opportunities + just generally kept in close contact and regularly keep each other in the loop for opportunities of all kinds. We also just became a really amazing space to meet other women in male-dominated fields. I made lifelong friends here, and recently went to Berkeley to meet up with a couple of them who are now leading the undergraduate women in economics at Berkeley society. Super super proud of my girls :,)

With friends from my female student alliance

Not VERY directly leadership experience, but I also co-lead a screenwriting society and wrote + directed + acted in a mini play we had at Stanford during the summer of 2025!

The play I wrote, directed, and acted in at Stanford in summer 2025

I think my takeaway from all this experience is that being a leader is being a very good friend with very concrete planning abilities. You need a vision, a plan to execute it, and you need to be close enough to everyone onboard for them to really follow you in that vision. And honestly just be fun to be around. Tell jokes, plan fun activities, ask people questions about themselves, be genuinely INTERESTED in uplifting other people and bringing out the very very best in them. Because EVERYONE has the ability to completely change the world, they just need to be reminded of that from time to time.

Languages

I grew up speaking Polish, Spanish, and Czech, and travelling around Europe. I also speak Mandarin Chinese, and I am hoping to add French to this list.

Note on stories/perspectives

I think that the most valuable project that I've learnt from is my life as a whole. I had a very eccentric upbringing, being brought up in a very rough council area in South Wales in a less than functional household and facing homelessness for three years.

There have been periods in my life where I had to learn to make marmelade from pinecones because there just wasn't enough food to go around, and there have been periods in my life where I've had breakfasts with research fellows at Stanford Law.

Everything that I've achieved in life I've done with minimal resources and minimal contacts, and that resourcefulness is something I bring into everything I do.

I have a very aggressive approach towards the impossible because time and time again I have done the unthinkable. I've seen impossible things become real so many times it's just impossible for me to think that can't be true of anything else. I left home alone with nothing and I made it work. Who's to say nothing else won't?

Diana M