Notes

Math Boot Camp: making the mathematical foundations of a PhD accessible, without losing the rigor.

Coming from a weaker K–12 math background than many of my peers, I spent a lot of time catching up across mathematical topics on my way to a PhD program. That experience shaped a view on how to make math topics more accessible while still preserving their rigor — and it's the motivation behind these notes.

The Math Boot Camp notes are written for incoming PhD students in Operations Research and related programs, in the spirit of the longstanding PhD Economics Math Boot Camp. They're inspired by the first-year PhD sequences at Berkeley IEOR in Optimization and Stochastic Processes, and cover Real Analysis, Linear Algebra, and Probability — including gradient descent and optimization theory, linear programming, the Poisson process, and Brownian motion.