Thomas Finn Lidbetter

About me CV ReRack

About me

I am a mathematics and computer science enthusiast currently working on the Algorithms and Optimization team at RideCo, a Sofware as a Service company providing dynamic transit ridesharing solutions. In 2017 I graduated from Mount Allison University in Sackville New Brunswick with a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Computer Science and a minor in Philosophy. I went on to complete a Master's of Mathematics in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, and completed my thesis and my degree in December 2018.

Publications

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

Patents

• 11429910: Dynamic scheduling of driver breaks in a ride-sharing service (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 that I hope to update and add to some day soon: youtube.com/finnlidbetter
• Handtool woodworking projects: Penrose Tiling (technically it is a quasicrystal and not a Penrose tiling as I broke the matching rules in a few places), 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 programming challenges (a.k.a., problems), contribute test data to problems, and provide feedback on wording. I have contributed several problems of my own. A list of the problems that I have authored can be found here: https://open.kattis.com/problem-authors/Finn%20Lidbetter.

I have helped prepare the Atlantic Canadian Preliminary Contest, the Mount Allison Programming Showdown (MAPS), the Northeast North America ICPC contetest, The North American Divisional Contest, and the North American Championship. I have worked as the chief judge for the Northeast North America ICPC region since 2020.

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, a collection of north american students that all enjoy mathematics enough to decide to participate in the contest. The median score in 2016 was 1/120.