Math competitions, crypto as alchemy & Gasper with Yan Zhang

This week, Anna and guest host Tarun Chitra chat with Yan X Zhang, professor at SJSU, about math competitions, math education, how crypto is like alchemy and the Gasper paper - work Yan and his students collaborated on with the Ethereum Foundation.

“Gasper” is a proof-of-stake-based consensus protocol, which is an idealized version of the proposed Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain. The protocol combines Casper FFG, a finality tool, with LMD GHOST, a fork-choice rule.

Here are a few episodes and papers that we mention:

Consensus Algorithms & HotStuff with Ittai Abraham

Combining GHOST and Casper

Ali Rahimi - NIPS 2017 Test-of-Time Award presentation

As mentioned in the intro, we looking for some help on the organisational front with some of the zk related projects - this Zero Knowledge Podcast, zkStudyClub, zkSummit and the zkValidator.

If you are looking to connect with the ecosystem, learn more and work on zk research AND if you are very organised and have worked producing either events, content or generally organising people in the past, these roles might be interesting for you.

Here are the 2 roles:

1) zkPodcast Support: Work with Anna & Fredrik on our zk-related projects (excluding the zkValidator) on a part-time basis. This would primarily involve coordinating podcast guest, scheduling and coordinating studyclub sessions, help organise events like the zkSummit, writing blog posts and managing social channels. This would be 5-8 hours per week to start, and could be a student job.

If this is interesting, please email a brief CV (a short email describing your experience is also fine) to [email protected] or tweet at Anna -> @AnnaRRose

2) Project Manager at the zkValidator. In this role, you would be working with Anna and Will Harborne to connect with members of the networks the zkValidator operates on - that is Cosmos, Kusama, Polkadot and more as we add them. The role would entail writing reports, doing research, managing network partners, scheduling workshops, working with zk engineers and cryptographers and more. This would be 15 hours per week to start, and we are looking for someone with at least 3 years of work experience. If this is interesting, please send us a summarised CV and/or LinkedIn profile to [email protected]

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