Why I love graphs

I’ll just come out and say it: I love graphs. The mathematical kind, with nodes and edges.

Growing up I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do for work. I was interested in psychology, math came pretty naturally and I liked it, I loved sports, but nothing really shined bright.

Then early in college I took an Intro to Algorithms class, where I was introduced to graph algorithms. I still remember the feeling I had all semester: like I had discovered something precious and magical. I would walk out of the lecture hall with a spring in my step, and walk around campus with a sense of awe and possibility.

It was the start of a lifelong obsession. There is just something about doing math over graphs that fills my soul.

And what’s cool about modern AI is that under the hood, it’s still just math over a graph: optimizing a loss function over an artificial neural network. The same shapes that lit me up back then are what I get to work on today.

That’s why I love this work. So much so that I even have a tattoo of a graph (a separate, funny story).

What’s your version of a graph?