Simone Hu

I am a DPhil student in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford, where I have the privilege of working with the guidance of Francis Brown and Erik Panzer. I am fascinated by the interplay of combinatorics, geometry and mathematical physics.

I previously spent a bunch of time at the University of Waterloo, where I received both my BMath and MMath degrees. During my master’s, I was fortunate to be advised by Karen Yeats in the Department of Combinatorics & Optimization.

Very broadly, I like to think about problems that have a combinatorial flavour.
My current research programme is driven by three major interacting forces:

• Invariant differential forms related to general linear groups and symmetric spaces
• Graph complexes related to deformation theory, manifold invariants, and various (tropical) moduli spaces
• Generalized Feynman integrals and their periods arising in quantum field theory

In the not so distant past, I’ve thought more about the combinatorics of quantum field theory and scattering amplitudes, with a focus on Feynman periods, their graph symmetries and graph polynomials, and related arithmetic invariants. I’ve also ventured into the world of Le diagrams and other associated combinatorial objects.