GTF: Hi. How's your first year at St John's?
RM: It's going really well. I'm enjoying it and learning a lot of new things. It’s a very nice community and really good teachers.
GTF: Glad to hear it! I look forward to learning about the “
Rushil-verse” in this conversation, but let's begin at the beginning. What first got you interested in math and computer science?
RM: It started when I was preparing for a local math competition in Mumbai at age 12. The questions in that competition were very challenging. I often had no idea where to even start! I was just clueless – and that really sparked my interest. It made me realize that there were challenging problems that could make me think for hours at a stretch. The thrill of solving such problems put me on to math competitions.
GTF: So after that competition, you’re on your way. What helped you in your journey from there to the International Math Olympiad about six years later?
RM: The community really helped, because until I was 14 or 15, I was mostly on my own, with some support from my parents and downloaded reading material. But when I first went to a math camp and got into some online communities, it was an exciting feeling. I also got to explore how people from various countries approached maths.
Camps helped too, like the IMO training in India in 2023. I made great friends, learned a lot. It convinced me that I wanted to do mathematics in college and beyond! And the IMO itself – it was a great privilege to be there. But more than just the medal I won, it was about the journey, learning more about math and about myself, about what truly excites me.
GTF: Speaking of what excites you, what are your favorite topics within math and computer science?
RM: In competitions, definitely combinatorics. I also wrote a book on it. I really liked that you had to come up with new ideas – there's no standard technique that works every time. For computer science, I think I'm more into the theoretical aspects, into cryptography, algorithms, quantum computing.
I feel like the Olympiad combinatorics translates more into the theoretical computer science of college, rather than the combinatorics of college. Theoretical CS is just math with the CS name attached to it.
GTF: You mentioned the book, which can help younger students. Tell me more about your advice to them – other than “read the book,” of course!
RM: The biggest advice, much bigger than reading my book or not, is to do these competitions only because you genuinely enjoy the math you’re learning. It’s very easy to get drawn into the whole ambition of, you know, making the IMO team. But more often than not, that ambition clouds your mind from the true nature of what should really be going on – genuinely enjoying the math.
I had a pretty disappointing IMO team selection test in 11th grade. I was quite sad about it. But thinking about why I had been doing these Olympiads, I realized that regardless of the result, I wanted to do these competitions anyway, just because I enjoyed what I was learning.
GTF: I saw on your website interests outside of math. Tell me more about those.
RM: I play piano, although, to be fair, that's gone down a little bit during college. Recently, I've been playing a lot of bullet chess, which doesn’t count as real chess. But I have also played some classical chess for the Oxford chess team, so I'm enjoying that quite a bit.
I also play a lot of social deduction games, like Blood on the Clocktower. It's a more advanced version of Mafia, with a lot more logic and a lot less luck. The roles are complicated, and it’s quite exciting to figure out who’s telling the truth and what’s really going on.
GTF: Looking ahead, what are you interested in doing this summer?
RM: I have some math topics that I've been keeping to self-study during the vacation – complexity theory, some cryptography, abstract algebra. In math, I feel like self-study is probably the best way to gain some insight into many topics and understand your interests.
I’m also considering research programs, and going to some math camps in India as a resource person, like for the IMO team.
GTF: Looking at the rest of your undergrad and beyond, what do you want to do?
RM: By the end of my second or third year, I hope to have a good idea of whether I want to do a Ph.D., and topics I’d be looking at. Or on the other side to see if I’m interested in quantitative trading.
I did attend some higher courses this semester, in quantum computing and one in probabilistic combinatorics, just to explore.
GTF: And outside of academic work, any goals you want to share?
RM: In high school, I felt pretty deeply that a lot of people don't enjoy math because they don't really understand it. Because it's not taught very well at school.
I would like to do something for students in high school and maybe even before, to develop a new approach to math that would help students enjoy it much more.
I did set up a club at my school for this, and I've been trying to do it here and there, but something at a larger scale would be very exciting at some point in my life.
