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

Name-Independent Compact Oblivious Routing
With Will Fletcher, Bernhard Haeupler, Ellis Hershkowitz, and Yiting Wang
SODA 2027
Summary
Compact routing with low congestion is harder if the names of nodes are unrelated to the underlying graph (even it's a tree) but you can get \((\log n)^{\sqrt{\log n}}\) space/congestion
Improved Parallel Algorithms for EF1 Allocations
With Kishen Gowda, Ellis Hershkowitz, and Greg Kehne
WINE 2026
arXiv, Slides, Summary
NC algorithms when the number of agents is small and large, and other results
Planar Length-Constrained Minimum Spanning Trees
With Ellis Hershkowitz
STOC 2026
arXiv, Slides, Summary
We wanted to show that this problem is easier to approximate in planar graphs and started by defining length-constrained separators which wasn't enough so we also defined length-constrained divisions
Simple Length-Constrained Minimum Spanning Trees
With Ellis Hershkowitz
SOSA 2025
arXiv, Slides, Summary
The algorithm uniformly randomly samples vertices and then does something kinda greedy to match current best upper bounds
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 \(\sqrt{d}\) and \(d\) lower/upper bounds for the \(d\) partition matroids intersection prophet inequality
On Multidimensional Stable Matching
Advised by Mark Braverman
Undergrad junior paper, 2022
Summary
The expected number of solutions for a random instance of \(d\) dimensional stable matching with complete preferences and \(n\) agents for each of the \(d\) 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 and 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]

Jeremy, Victor, and I performed this one at Jeremy's senior recital

More chamber music with Jeremy and Victor and with Alex and Jeremy

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

Me and Ken jamming [1, 2, 3]