web.youwen.dev

Hi there. I’m Youwen. I study math and computer science at UC Santa Barbara.

I’m a member of the MIT OpenCompute Laboratory and benevolent dictator at functor.systems.

Here is my GitHub, university transcript, CV/resume, and a picture of my cats.

I am interested in the nPOV and how we can apply higher structures to solve hard problems. In general, I prefer to use free-as-in-freedom software. I developed functorOS, an experimental NixOS-based Linux distribution—among other free software contributions.

I like hacking, and hackathons. Most recently, I won the grand prize at HackMIT 2025. This year I am organizing SB Hacks, the headliner hackathon of UC Santa Barbara.

In my spare time, I play guitar and spend too much money on guitar pedals. I listen to a lot of music.

See about for more about myself, or now for what I’m up to right now. Or explore the other pages on this website.

I happen to believe that many of the staple questions that were originally the provenance of the philosopher will eventually be handled with the care they deserve once they are adequately framed as problems within category theory, and that in the near future every major philosophical dialectic—universal–particular, continuous–discrete, global-local, quality–quantity—and even less obvious problems, such as those of “personal identity,” will be handed over to, and considerably enriched by, the category theorist.
— Rosiak, Sheaf Theory through Examples

By the way

I recently embarked on a full redesign of the underlying infrastructure of this website, switching from Rust to Haskell. The website mostly looks the same, with a few upgraded features thanks to Hakyll, but there may be broken hyperlinks or outdated content for a while. Pardon the dust!