Aden Chen

I’m a second-year undergraduate student at UChicago studying Economics and Mathematics. The following are a few of my more interesting projects. Clicking on the project names leads you to their corresponding Github repository.

LaTeX

My LaTeX package and Ultisnips snippets file for taking math notes using LaTeX and vim.

Check out a sample Overleaf document using my LaTeX package.

Borrowed heavily from gillescastel’s preamble file for his lecture notes, his snippets file (see also his blog post), and Andrew Lin’s package, lindrew.

Guess the Operator

Super nerdy game made during the 2024 UChicago Hackathon with Hanlei Wen, Ziad Elshahawy, Justin Zhang, and Jack Hu.

First-prize in web development category.

Play it here. Have fun!

Ex Libris

I have very recently started a popular science media with a few of my friends (20+!) named Ex Libris. (The name was appropriated from the name of a cafe located on the first floor of the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago.)

The website for Ex Libris is still in development and has only one demo article that I’ve written during the past winter break about framing effect, transaction utility theory, scarcity theory etc.; the demo article was written in Chinese, but most, if not all, future articles will be in English.

2024.04: Project failed. Website might be recycled for personal blogging use.

English Reading Practice Website

One common challenge in learning English as a second language (at a beginner to intermediate level) that I both experienced personally and observed among peers is the tendency to memorize translations of English words, making it difficult to understand their precise meanings in context due to nuances lost in translation. To address this issue, I tried to develop a new learning model where the learner is presented with new words, learns the new words, and immediately practices using them in context (instead of the common process of “reading -> finding new vocabulary -> learning new vocabulary( -> not seeing the words in the near future -> remembering only the translation, if not completely forgetting)”).

This website serves as an implementation of the proposed learning model. Users begin by selecting a passage, selecting and learning unfamiliar words within the passage (before being shown the full passage), and then immediately practicing using these newly learned words within the context of the passage via, for example, doing fill-in-the-blank or multiple-choice questions about the newly learned words.

Online APA7 In-Text Citation Checker

During high school, I had to write several essays using APA7 format and was unaware of the existence of LaTeX. I’m familiar with various citation generator tools that assist in creating a reference list (one of which I particularly liked is Scribbr), but I could not find any free online tools that can check my in-text citations. In particular, I need a tool that can:

verity the format of my in-text citations (because some rules are kind of confusing for beginners), and
check whether my in-text citations match my reference list (i.e. whether each in-text citation has a matching entry in the reference list, and all entries in my reference list has been cited somewhere in the essay.)

So I created one using RegExp. It looks extremely primitive (because it is), but it gets the job done (mostly).

Econic

Animations about behavioral economics concepts used in Econic, a Wechat Official Account blog publishing articles explaining behavioral economics to the general public.

Citation Network

I tried to visualize the reference lists of some research papers I read as a graph (each node represents a research paper, each edge a citation). Here’s a demo of what I did. (Of course, this was before I know the existence of Connected Papers, which does a much, much better job.)

Online function plotting

A webpage that plots function images.

CTB Website

Website for a CTB project on motivating sports participation among Chinese high school girls.

2048 solver

Implemented using Minimax algorithm and Alpha-Beta pruning.

FaceTimelapse

Align faces to produce goofy animations.

Here’s Michael Stevens, creator of Vsauce, my favorite educational channel on YouTube:

https://github.com/AdenChen27/AdenChen27.github.io/assets/88664205/07696c62-9ef5-4181-a4f4-27ede6e74234

And here’s Stevie Nicks:

https://github.com/AdenChen27/AdenChen27.github.io/assets/88664205/ddbabc4d-db99-4370-b9c0-90f9787455fd