Hi! I'm a mathematician, musician, programmer, writer and designer living in New York. I work as an assistant professor in the mathematics department at Rutgers University–Newark.

I am an avid collaborator; if my work interests you, please get in touch! My academic email address is robbie.lyman@rutgers.edu, but I can also be reached at rb.lymn@gmail.com. (Indeed, for non-academic things, I’d prefer to use that email address.)

I hold a PhD in Mathematics from Tufts University, where my advisor was Kim Ruane, and a BA in Mathematics and Music from Columbia University. Before starting as an assistant professor, I was a postdoc at Rutgers University–Newark. During that time I was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation. My postdoc mentor was Lee Mosher. I am an expert in the theories of groups acting on trees and outer automorphisms of free groups, placing my mathematics within the young field of geometric group theory within the general areas of geometry and topology. My interest in mathematics is broad as well as deep, extending at least somewhat into dynamics, set theory, category theory and algebraic geometry.

I’m classically trained in piano performance and music theory, and knowledgeable about music production, synthesis, computer music systems and so on. In 2022, I recorded and released my first album of pop music, Learning to Run as Alanza. (Although the album is self-released, you can also find it on all streaming platforms.) I have performed at Wonderville, Trans-Pecos, Millenium Film Workshop, The Firehouse Worcester, and William Hazard’s Theatre of the Flat Imagination, among other places.

In 2024, I attended the Recurse Center, a 12-week program that describes itself as “a writer’s retreat for programmers”. My open source software projects are hosted on Github. I am the author of seamstress, an “art engine” and Lua environment for music, visuals, games and creative coding. Currently I am working on a version 2.0.0 of seamstress.

I designed the logo of Spectra, the association for LGBT mathematicians. In 2016, I did design and typesetting work for Vetch, a magazine of trans poetry and poetics.