Zachary Burton

I am a recent graduate of MIT with SB in Mathematics.

Most recently, I was a Software Engineering Intern at Meta (Summer 2025), where I refactored the copyright enforcement pipeline.

I am extremely interested in about AI for mathematics. I was born in NYC and raised in the UK. Outside of research, I've ran track for 10 years! (10.63s 100m). Feel free to reach out if you want to chat!

Email | CV | GitHub | LinkedIn | Blog

Research

	When Does Tabular RL Actually Break? Blog Post, 2025 post A systematic study of representation bottlenecks in symbolic algebra, testing where RL breaks on high school math.
	Collision Thresholds on Lattices Preprint arXiv An expository derivation using Poissonization and Laplace asymptotics to analyze random walks on lattices.
	Persuasiveness of LLMs in Political Discourse paper A study of how LLM-generated content shapes political persuasion and argumentation.
	SIPGA Scholar Research ASTAR*, 2023 materials Conducted Reinforcement Learning research as a scholarship recipient.

Selected Projects

	zOS github Local LLM self-training loop with step-by-step feedback, written with Rust & Tauri.
	Neurosymbolic Synthesis Engine A C++ synthesizer featuring a custom AST, evaluator, and stochastic/beam search backends.
	PIEFACE: Online RLHF Sandbox website An online sandbox for RLHF research. Built with a Flask backend and distributed PPO training loop.
	Scribe AI devpost Autocomplete for math handwriting.

Speaking

	Being Black at Tonbridge video A reflection on my experience navigating race at a UK boarding school.
	Why White People Shouldn't Say the N-Word video A talk on language, power, and context.
	Magnetic Gauss Law video A physics microlecture on electromagnetism.

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