Your Headshot

Richard Z Huang

I'm a PhD student at Brown University, where I'm advised by Ellis Hershkowitz. Earlier, I did my undergrad at Princeton University.

I work on stuff in theoretical computer science, mainly in combinatorial optimization and approximation algorithms.

Contact: rzh @ brown.edu


Work

Papers

Planar Length-Constrained Minimum Spanning Trees
With Ellis Hershkowitz
STOC 2026
arXiv, Summary
There was this one night shortly before the deadline where I edited the overleaf at 4am and went to bed and then Ellis woke up and started editing it at 4:30am
Simple Length-Constrained Minimum Spanning Trees
With Ellis Hershkowitz
SOSA 2025
arXiv, Slides, Summary
The algorithm uniformly samples vertices and then does something kinda greedy to match current best upper bounds for this bicriteria spanning tree problem
Prophet Inequality of Partition Matroid Intersection
Advised by Matt Weinberg
Undergrad senior thesis, 2023
Princeton DataSpace, Summary
I did not close the gap between the root d lower bound and d upper bound for the prophet inequality constrained to an intersection of d partition matroids
On Multidimensional Stable Matching
Advised by Mark Braverman
Undergrad junior paper, 2022
Summary
The expected number of solutions for a random instance of k dimensional stable matching with complete preferences and n agents for each of the k parties is polynomial on n

Teaching

At Brown:
  • CSCI 2952T (Algorithms Toolkit): Fall 2024
At Princeton:
  • COS 126 (Intro CS): Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023
  • COS 340 (Discrete Math): Spring 2021, Fall 2021
  • COS 445 (Economics of Computation): Spring 2022, Spring 2023
  • COS 451 (Computational Geometry): Fall 2022

Play

Me playing oboe

I post music on the internet when I have time

I also write down things for my friends and I to play together when I have a lot of time [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

We performed this one at Jeremy's senior recital

I enjoyed spending time on creative projects in my college classes like this and this

A pic of the back of my head (in the bottom left) when I was in ppe