Hi, I’m Rylee. I’m a polymath interested in math, music, synthesis, creative coding, etc.

This is my personal and academic website; I work at Rutgers University–Newark where starting in Fall 2024, I’ll be an assistant professor in the math department.

I have two email addresses; for academic things, please use rylee.lyman@rutgers.edu. Otherwise you’re welcome to write to rylee.alanza@gmail.com. You can find my CV here.

Mathematically, I’m interested in many things. My favorite topics are group actions on trees and outer automorphisms of such groups. I earned my PhD in Mathematics from Tufts University, where my advisor was Kim Ruane.

I am the author of seamstress, a Lua scripting environment inspired by monome’s norns written in Zig. Seamstress runs a user-supplied Lua script (it also provides a Lua REPL and listens on a websocket for live-coding purposes) which defines its behavior in relation to music, visuals and data. Seamstress scripts may interact with other programs and devices (such as monome’s grid and arc) over MIDI or OSC. Currently seamstress, which is free software licenced under the GPL runs on macOS and Linux. I’m excited to push its capabilities further and welcome suggestions and collaboration.

In 2022, I recorded and released an album of pop songs as Alanza called Learning to Run.

I believe in education as the practice of freedom.

As applied to mathematics, I share Federico Ardila-Mantilla’s axioms:

• Axiom 1. Mathematical talent is distributed equally among different groups, irrespective of geographic, demographic, and economic boundaries.
• Axiom 2. Everyone can have joyful, meaningful, and empowering mathematical experiences.
• Axiom 3. Mathematics is a powerful, malleable tool that can be shaped and used differently by various communities to serve their needs.
• Axiom 4. Every student deserves to be treated with dignity and respect.