Woojin Kim, 김우진

I am an Assistant Professor of Mathematical Sciences at KAIST. I was a William W. Elliott Assistant Research Professor of Mathematics at Duke University from August 2020 to June 2023. I received a Ph.D. in May, 2020 from Ohio State.

My research interests revolve around developing the theoretical and computational foundations of Topological Data Analysis (TDA) and their applications. For my research, I primarily exploit concepts from algebraic & combinatorial topology, (algebraic) combinatorics, metric geometry, commutative algebra, representation theory, and category theory, blending these with ideas of persistence in TDA. I also often run into computational geometry & topology questions during my research. I want to expand the use of geometric and topological ideas to a broader range of data science and machine learning. Link to Google Scholar

News

January, 2026. Mini ToGeDA workshop takes place on Jan. 7-8, 2026. All are welcome to join. (note: most (or all) of the talks are delivered in Korean)

November, 2025. The papers Interleaving Distance as an Edit distance and Barcoding Invariants and Their Equivalent Discriminating Power have been accepted as contributed talks for ATMCS 12 in Leipzig. The former will be presented by Won Seong, and the latter by myself.

Sep, 2025. Limit Theorems for Verbose Persistence Diagrams with Jeong-hwi Joe and Cheolwoo Park has been posted to arXiv.

Aug, 2025. I have joined the Program Committee for the 42nd International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2026).

July, 2025. I have joined the Speaker Selection Committee of Applied Algebraic Topology Research Network (AATRN) and will serve a two-year term. If you have a speaker suggestion for the Speaker Selection Committee to consider(including yourself), please fill out this form.

July, 2025. I was honored with an Excellent Teaching Award from the College of Natural Sciences at KAIST.

May, 2025. Super-Polynomial Growth of the Generalized Persistence Diagram with Donghan Kim and Wonjun Lee has been invited to a special issue of Journal of Computational Geometry, devoted to a selection of papers from SoCG 2025.

Feb, 2025. Sparsification of the Generalized Persistence Diagrams for Scalability through Gradient Descent with Matheiu Carrièr (Inria) and Seunghyun Kim (Masters student at KAIST) has been accepted to SoCG 2025.

Dec, 2024. I have joined the Scientific Committee for ATMCS 11.

Upcoming Trips

July 6-10, 2026. The 15th AIMS Conference in Athens, Greece Topological Data Analysis: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications

June 29-July 3, 2026 Workshop on Topological Combinatorics

February 12-13, 2026. Topological Data Analysis and Representation Theory 2026, Tohoku University, Japan 

January 26-30, 2026. Algebraic Topology: Methods, Computation, and Science (ATMCS 12), Max Planck Institute, Germany