About Me
Who is this Dan Kinch guy, anyway?
Hi, I’m Dan!
I grew up in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, USA, spent seven years living in Chicago, England, and India, and currently live in a different suburb of Denver than the one I did originally.
My main driving forces are curiosity-based: few things give me more joy than learning why and learning how. In my work, I strive to help others experience math and physics in the same ways I do.
In my life, I aim to experience as much depth and breadth of this human existence as I possibly can. I also love to laugh, and to help others do the same.
Northwestern University
Sep 2013 - Sep 2017
I was awarded a QuestBridge National College Match Scholarship in December 2012, and I moved to Northwestern as a chemical engineering major the following September. Two quarters of freshman chemistry (coupled with my despair at the lack of further math courses in the ChemE degree requirements) convinced me to switch my College of Engineering major to applied math. I also pursued a BA degree in physics through the College of Arts & Sciences, and graduated both programs summa cum laude in June 2017. I wrote an honours dissertation for my physics degree (titled “Neutrino Oscillations as Earth Structure Probes”), which also served as my capstone project as a Murphy Scholar.
Besides being a massive nerd, my other activities during this chapter included No Fun Mud Piranhas (improv comedy), This We Believe (group discussion facilitation), Project SOAR (youth mentorship), Dance Marathon (student philanthropy), and Society of Physics Students (self-explanatory). I greatly enjoyed living in a walkable city where I never needed a car, and could take a $4 train ride into Chicago in less than an hour. I did not enjoy spending four winters in the Chicago area. (But they made the warm and sunny days all the more glorious.)
Durham University
Sep 2017 - Sep 2018
As a college senior, I was awarded a two-year Marshall Scholarship to study math and physics in the UK. I spent the first of these years at Durham University in northeast England, taking classes in differential geometry, represenation theory, topology, solitons, real analysis, and quantum field theory. I took my exams for these courses in May and June of 2018, then spent the summer working with my solitons professor on my Master’s dissertation, titled “Investigating Instantons in Pure Yang-Mills Gauge Theories”. I completed my degree with distinction in September 2018.
Outside the classroom, I was an active member in the Shellshock improv group, which (after four years of weekly workshops at NU) gave me my first experience with performing improv for an audience. This culminated in a trip to the Edinburgh Fringe in August 2018, where Shellshock put on nightly shows and (in my free time) I gorged myself on musicals, comedy acts, and (most of all) magic shows. I also got my first debating experience with the Durham Union Society, which culminated in a Manchester intervarsity competition at which I advanced to the final round of the novice bracket.
Over the course of my year at Durham, I served as one of the social secretaries for Grey College‘s postgraduate society (Middle Common Room / MCR), in which capacity I helped plan and coordinate formal dinners, field trips, and holiday parties. I also worked as a Maths & Stats Lab drop-in tutor, to gain more teaching experience and supplement the income from my Marshall stipend.
I helped write lyrics for the DULOG 24-Hour Musical in December 2017, performed improv at the Durham Drama Festival in February 2018, and delivered a symposium talk titled “Why is the Sky Blue?” (which was awarded the Grey College Prize) in March 2018.
University of Cambridge
Sep 2018 - Sep 2019
I spent the second year of my Marshall tenure at the University of Cambridge, where I was a member of Gonville & Caius College and undertaking Part III of the Maths Tripos. Despite the name, my coursework focused almost exclusively on theoretical physics: I took exams in general relativity, symmetries/fields/particles, quantum field theory (again), string theory, supersymmetry, and the Standard Model. I also audited classes in quantum information theory, advanced quantum field theory, black holes, and algebraic topology, the last of which was one of my favourite classes at Cambridge — too bad it was an undergrad class that I couldn’t get course credit for!
I kept my improv streak going as a member of the Cambridge Impronauts, which enabled me to keep performing comedy shows right up through the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe. I also doubled down on writing lyrics for 24-hour musicals, this time for Cambridge Musical Theatre Society‘s production of “Love Island: The Musical”. (This time around, they made me the lyricist for both the opening and closing numbers of the musical, presumably because I was one of the only applicants whose CV included prior experience with this excessively niche art form.) And I became my college’s social secretary for the second year in a row.
My Cambridge year wasn’t completely comprised of reprises from my Durham year, though. Through the Cambridge Footlights, I got to dip my toe in the waters of stand-up comedy (through their Freshers’ Smoker) and sketch comedy (through their show ‘2030’), the latter of which was some of the most fun I’ve ever had with a group of relative strangers. I also got to ride a bike absolutely everywhere, which I loved dearly.
HeyMath!
Oct 2019 - Oct 2020
Going into my Marshall tenure, my plan had been to start a PhD shortly after finishing my master’s programme at Cambridge. By the time application season started gearing up in February 2019, however, it had become clear to me that I would be doing so for mostly bad reasons (staying on the academic escalator and enjoying the comfort and continuity of being an eternal student, rather than actually conducting years of research in a topic that interested me). I pivoted to looking for jobs, specifically in the realm of online math education; around this same time, I met Nimmi Sankaran (CEO of the Chennai-based company HeyMath!) at an information session, and the rest is history.
During my time at HeyMath, I wrote problems for an OECD PISA practice test, wrote scripts for new online math lessons, and worked with an animator to bring those lessons to life. I was a regular at The Spotted Hyena‘s improv workshops and classes, and rekindled my love of board games at The Board Room in Mylapore. I got to travel to Pondicherry for a visit with an old friend, Sri Lanka for a week of travel with another, the hills of Coimbatore for Isha Yoga‘s celebration of Mahashivarathri, and the beaches of Goa for one last hostel getaway. I also started my first blog.
Then the pandemic happened, and I spent the next four months (March-July 2020) never leaving the grounds of my apartment complex, where I was one of two residents. In addition to my remote work for HeyMath!, I passed my time holding video calls, reading books, cooking Indian recipes, and taking daily rooftop walks while listening to podcasts. I left HeyMath! and returned to the US when my visa expired in October 2020, since renewing visas wasn’t the Indian government’s highest priority at the time.
Freelance tutoring / AoPS
Nov 2020 / Jun 2021 - Present
Newly unemployed and unmoored, I stayed with friends in New York for the first month of my time in the US, during which time I had my first flirtation with self-employment: tutoring high school and college students over Google Meet. I initially intended this as a temporary job to cover my basic expenses until I could leave the country again and find a new full-time job, but it’s stubbornly persisted amidst all my various life changes since then (including a move back to my hometown of Denver, Colorado). Over the past two-and-a-half years, I’ve tutored students from CU, CSU, Brown, Stanford, Cambridge, and others, as well as high school students from around the country and younger learners from around the world. I’ve been taking notes the entire time, with the intent to publish my most frequently-used explanations on this website as a free resource for all.
During a May 2021 lament to my friend Kevin Zhou about how my tutoring work was about to dry up for the summer, he recommended I look into teaching/curriculum jobs with Art of Problem Solving (AoPS), whom he’d previously worked with on physics competition coaching. As luck would have it, they were in the midst of hiring summer instructors for their recently-formed Virtual Campus (VC), and I jumped aboard as quickly as I could. I’ve since taught Zoom-based VC classes for 3rd grade through high school, and have worn a number of other hats for AoPS Online, including message board halper, teaching assistant, and (as of April 2022) course instructor. I’ve taught classes on geometry, number theory, counting & probability (both introductory and intermediate), precalculus, calculus, Python programming (both introductory and intermediate), competition physics (F=ma and PhysicsWOOT), and competition math (AMC and MATHCOUNTS). I’ve also made regular contributions to the curricula of AoPS Online courses, and I completed an overhaul of the Intro to Geometry lesson plans during a summer 2023 stint at AoPS HQ.
Life outside the classroom
Working as a fully remote freelancer gives me a lot of much-appreciated flexibility in my day-to-day schedule, which I mostly put toward building community in Denver and working on personal projects.
I’ll share the results of some of those projects on this website (usually on my Creative and Notes pages); the rest will get honourable mentions on my Now page.