About me

Hello, my name is Finn! I am a mathematics and computer science enthusiast currently working as a Senior Software Engineer on the Algorithms and Optimization team at RideCo. I completed a bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Computer Science with a minor in Philosophy at Mount Allison University in 2017, and a Master's of Mathematics in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in 2018.

Publications

Improved Bound for the Gerver-Ramsey Collinearity Problem (2024; Lidbetter)
Computational Aspects of Sturdy and Flimsy Numbers (2020; Clokie, Lidbetter, Lovett, Shallit, Witzman)
Counting, Adding, and Regular Languages (2018; Lidbetter---Master's Thesis)
Additive Number Theory via Approximation by Regular Languages (2018; Bell, Lidbetter, Shallit)
Counting Subwords and Regular Languages (2018; Colbourn, Dougherty, Lidbetter, Shallit)
Towards Provably Moral AI Agents in Bottom-up Learning Frameworks (2018; Shaw, Orr, Stöckel, Lidbetter, Cohen)
A Variation on Chip-Firing: the diffusion game (2017; Duffy, Lidbetter, Messinger, Nowakowski)

Patents

11429910: Dynamic scheduling of driver breaks in a ride-sharing service (2021; Lidbetter, Bailey, Goes, Gururajan, Sivakumar)

Hobbies

I enjoy a wide range of hobbies including playing piano, curling and skiing in the winter, rock climbing, woodworking, and competitive programming.

Some piano recordings: youtube.com/finnlidbetter
Handtool woodworking projects: Penrose Tiling, TV Cabinet with Ulam Spiral doors Image 1 Image 2, bedside table.
Other crafty project: Hilbert Curve Banner.

Competitive Programming

I have been volunteering my time as a judge for several ICPC and ICPC-style contests since 2018. I write sample solutions to problems, contribute test data for problems, and provide feedback on wording. Since 2021, I have been the Chief Judge for the Northeast North America ICPC region. A list of problems I have authored can be found here: https://open.kattis.com/problem-authors/Finn%20Lidbetter.

Other contests that I have contributed to as a problem author or judge include:

The Mount Allison Programming Showdown (MAPS)
The Atlantic Canadian Preliminary Contest
The North American Championship

Bragging rights

My Erdős number is 2 via Additive Number Theory via Approximation by Regular Languages (Bell, Lidbetter, Shallit) and New Bounds on the Length of Finite Pierce and Engel Series (Erdős, Shallit). Or alternatively via Counting Subwords and Regular Languages (Colbourn, Dougherty, Lidbetter, Shallit) and A Conjecture on Dominating Cycles (Clark, Colbourn, Erdős).
I participated in the 2017 ICPC World Finals, in Rapid City, South Dakota, USA, as a member of the Mount Allison University ICPC team. To qualify for this competition we beat Harvard University (scoreboard). For reference, Mount Allison University had only 6 computer science major graduates in 2017, three of which were me and my two ICPC teammates.
I scored 28/120 in the 2016 Putnam Contest. This placed me in the 88th percentile of participants that year, where the participants are a collection of north american students that all enjoy mathematics enough to opt into a 6-hour math contest on a Saturday. The median score in 2016 was 1/120.