About Me

I am currently a third-year PhD student in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University, advised by Dr. Morgane Austern. I am graciously supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Broadly, I am interested in the intersection of mathematics with statistical methods, such as universality, free probability, and random matrix theory. In June 2022, I completed my B.S. in Pure Mathematics and B.S. in Statistics at UCLA.

Outside of class, I am interested in lots of different things! I love playing the guitar & piano, cooking, pottery, shooting film photography, playing chess, learning languages, and more. My favorite artists are the Beatles, the Smiths, Clairo, Nick Drake, Eydie Gorme, and Chopin.

I do private tutoring for both statistics and mathematics. Please feel free to reach out to me by email if you would like tutoring for courses in the Harvard Statistics department, or anything else more general. Also check out my Instagram page, Razi ba Riazi, for cool mathematics videos, PhD advice, and more.

Theorem of the Month, February 2025

Recall that $(a, b, c) \in \mathbb{N}^3$ is a Pythagorean triple if $a^2 + b^2 = c^2$. Well, it turns out that $N = 7824$ is the largest integer such that we can color all the numbers $1, 2, \ldots, N$ red and blue without any Pythagorean triple being all red or all blue. For every number $7825$ or larger, this is provably impossible, because \(7825^2 = 625^2 + 7800^2 = 5180^2 + 5865^2\) ruins everything!

Song of the Month, February 2025

Glory of the Snow (Clairo): I have become a huge fan of Clairo since her Charm album came out and this song is by far my favorite, along with Terrapin!

Publications

Esmaili Mallory, M.*, Huang, K. H.*, & Austern, M. (2025). “Universality of High-Dimensional Logistic Regression and a Novel CGMT under Block Dependence with Applications to Data Augmentation.” Preprint. (Submitted).

Yu, A., Becquey, C., Halikias, D., Esmaili Mallory, M., & Townsend, A. (2021). “Arbitrary-Depth Universal Approximation Theorems for Operator Neural Networks.” arXiv preprint. arXiv:2109.11354.

(* indicates equal contribution)

Teaching

• Stat 149: Introduction to Generalized Linear Models, Dr. Mark Glickman. Harvard University, Spring 2024.

• Stat 104: Introduction to Quantitative Methods for Economics, Dr. Kevin Rader. Harvard University, Fall 2023.

• Math 115A: Linear Algebra, Dr. Will Conley. UCLA, Winter 2022.

• Math 115A: Linear Algebra, Dr. Christy Hazel. UCLA, Spring 2021.