Cesar Cuenca is originally from the small city of Barranca in Peru, where he began to develop his interest in problem solving from an early age and ended up representing his home country in several international math contests during his high school years. In 2010, he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he would spend 9 years completing his B.Sc. in 2014 and his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 2019. He spent the next year at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as Olga Taussky & John Todd Instructor in Mathematics, before returning to Boston as a Benjamin Peirce Fellow at Harvard University for the period 2020-2023. He joined the Department of Mathematics at Ohio State University in the Fall of 2023 as a tenure track Assistant Professor.
Cuenca's expertise is in Probability and Combinatorics. More specifically, his research spans several areas including random matrix theory, asymptotic representation theory, mathematical physics and algebraic combinatorics. In short, his work is motivated by problems from random matrices and mathematical physics (random partitions), but the methods he employs are algebraic and combinatorial in nature; this marriage between probability and algebra proves to be very beneficial and gives new perspectives on both sides. Cuenca has experience mentoring research projects for students at all levels, and he hopes to get involved in undergraduate research summer programs at OSU, such as ROMUS (Research Opportunities in Mathematics for Underrepresented Students).
