Zachariah Ross (formerly Zachariah Thomas)
About Me
I am a 5th year graduate student and teaching assistant for the UF mathematics department. My graduate advisor is Dr. Peter Bubenik, who has taught me more about Topological Data Analysis than I thought could possibly fit into one brain. I enjoy algebraic topology, topological data analysis, and teaching undergrad math. I also like spending time playing video games with my husband. Baldurs Gate and Total War are our favorites.
Fall 2025 Southeastern Sectional Meeting of the AMS
I will be giving a talk at the Special Session on Computational Topology and Geometry in Data Science at the Fall 2025 Southeastern Sectional Meeting of the American Mathematical Society to be held at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA on October 3rd-5th. At this talk, I will outline results from my thesis project, which I hope to soon apply to multiparameter persistence applications.
Interests
Teaching: I began my career teaching middle school math and high school algebra 1. Since then, I’ve spent about 6 years teaching college math courses. In that time, I’ve taught courses ranging from Precalculus to Calculus 2, with some detours in Math for Managerial Life Science. I’ve also been lucky enough to develop curricula materials for the university’s trigonometry courses, to be used department-wide and for online courses especially. For this, the department awarded me the Neil White Excellence in Teaching Award in 2023. I think every student has an ability to understand more of the complex structure of the universe (which is mostly math). It’s so fascinating how different people receive this information though. Discovering how to communicate with new students is the most riveting challenge to teaching.
Research: I enjoy researching Topological Data Analysis, a field of study that uses persistent homology to study shapes of data. The sub- field of multiparameter persistence is particularly interesting, as tools of the one-parameter persistence case don’t work in this broader setting. Active research is trying to bring structure to the space of multiparameter persistence modules, and more tightly anchor them to combinatorial summaries and vector representations.
Proctoring: Every semester, I organize the mathematics department’s proctor schedule for all coordinated math courses.
TDA Seminar: The university hosts a weekly seminar with a focus on recent results in topological data analysis. I am a regular contributor and have organized this seminar in the past.
My Favorite Math Quote
“As complexity increases, precise statements lose their meaning, and meaningful statements lose precision.”
-Lotfi Zadeh
Contact Information
Email: thomas.z@ufl.edu
Office: 461 Little Hall
Mailing address: Little Hall, Mailbox 8