Daryl DeFord’s Academic Homepage

I am an Assistant Professor of Statistics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Vassar College. Previously I was an Assistant Professor of Data Analytics at WSU and a postdoctoral associate at MIT (CSAIL) in the Geometric Data Processing Group, working under Justin Solomon. While I was a postdoc I was also affiliated with the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group at Tufts University, working with Moon Duchin on the mathematics of redistricting. In 2018, I earned my Ph.D. in mathematics at Dartmouth College under the supervision of Dan Rockmore.

I often generate .gifs from the kinds of discrete processes that come up in my research. Some colorful examples (with brief explanations in the mouseover text) below:

The ReCombination Markov chain running on a 3d cube. The SIR process from epidemiology running on the counties of Arkansas. Fast mixing walk on t-shaped tetromino tilings. Forced Diffusion on the World Trade Web network.

Binarized Laplacian Eigenvectors on a grid. Laplacian Eigenvector values on a grid.

A step-by-step lifted Markov chain on graph partitions. The outputs of a lifted walk on the counties of Arkansas. A step-by-step example of a two edge Markov chain. A step-by-step example of the marked edge Markov chain.

Visualization of the different networks reported in the Krackhardt business network. Markov chain for sampling uniform matchings on a grid. Simple random walk (left) and cumulative density (right) on the Karate Club. Loop Erased Random Walk on a grid to generate a uniform spanning tree.

Daryl R. DeFord