Yang Liu

Yang P. Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Member at the Institute for Advanced Study and earned his PhD from Stanford University under the supervision of Aaron Sidford. His research focuses on theoretical computer science and mathematics, emphasizing graph algorithms, optimization, high-dimensional geometry, and additive combinatorics. He has received notable awards including the A.W. Tucker Prize and Google PhD Fellowship, alongside multiple best paper recognitions at major conferences like FOCS, STOC, and ITCS.

Education: PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University (2023); BS from MIT (2018).

Research Interests:

• Graph Algorithms
• Optimization (especially convex and high-dimensional)
• Algorithmic Techniques in Additive Combinatorics
• Geometric and Structural Aspects of Computation

Teaching: Currently instructing CS 15-759: A Principled Approach to Optimization (Spring 2025), covering topics like gradient descent, interior-point methods, and sparsification techniques. Course emphasizes rigorous mathematical foundations.

Awards: Recognized for contributions to optimization theory and algorithmic complexity. His work bridges discrete mathematics and continuous optimization paradigms.