Ravi Fernando (he/him)

I am a J.L. Doob Research Assistant Professor at UIUC, where I have been since 2023. I did my Ph.D. at UC Berkeley (with Martin Olsson), and my undergrad degree at Stanford.

I am currently on the job market for positions starting in Fall 2026.

Hear how to pronounce my name.

Contact

Email: (my first name and last initial) at illinois dot edu.
Office hours (Fall 2025):  Tuesday 5-6pm in Davenport 212, Wednesday 3-4pm in Noyes 300.

For students:  If you're considering asking me for a recommendation letter, then please see this page.

Research

I am interested in p-adic cohomology theories for algebraic geometry in mixed characteristic and characteristic p. My current research is on the de Rham-Witt complex.

Papers:

  1. Dimensional vanishing of the saturated de Rham-Witt complex, 2025.  Submitted.
  2. Saturated de Rham-Witt complexes with unit-root coefficients (Ph.D. thesis version here), 2023.  Submitted.
  3. Restrictions on Weil polynomials of Jacobians of hyperelliptic curves (joint with Edgar Costa, Ravi Donepudi, Valentijn Karemaker, Caleb Springer, and Mckenzie West). Published in Arithmetic geometry, number theory, and computation (Simons Symposia), 2021.
  4. On an Inequality of Dimension-like Invariants for Finite Groups (undergraduate research), 2015.

My CV is here.

Teaching

At Illinois:

Fall 2025:  Math 347, Fundamental Mathematics - Honors section (Canvas page, syllabus and schedule)
Spring 2025:  Math 347, Fundamental Mathematics - Honors section (Canvas page, syllabus) and Merit section (Canvas page, syllabus)
Fall 2024: Math 416, Abstract Linear Algebra (Canvas page; syllabus and schedule)
Spring 2024: Math 347, Fundamental Mathematics (Canvas page)
Fall 2023: Math 347, Fundamental Mathematics (Canvas page)

At Berkeley:

Spring 2023: Math 53, multivariable calculus.
Spring 2022: Math 55, discrete math.
Fall 2021: Math 1A, first-semester calculus.
Spring 2021: Math 1B, second-semester calculus.
Fall 2019: Math 55, discrete math.
Fall 2018: Math 1B, second-semester calculus.
Fall 2017: Math 191, problem solving/Putnam exam preparation seminar. My problem sets and mock Putnam exam are available here.
Spring 2017: Math 55, discrete math.
Fall 2016: Math 1B, second-semester calculus.
Spring 2016: Math 54, linear algebra and differential equations.
Fall 2015: Math 1B, second-semester calculus.
Summer 2015: Math 1B, second-semester calculus.
Spring 2015: Math 1B, second-semester calculus.
Fall 2014: Math 1B, second-semester calculus.

PrimeGrid

Since 2019, I've served as a mathematical advisor to the distributed computing project PrimeGrid, which searches for large prime numbers of various forms. You can find my PrimeGrid page here.

Exposition

See here for some of my expository talks and writings.

Some things I've (co-)organized

2018 Berkeley arithmetic geometry RTG workshop
2020 Berkeley Undergraduate Number Theory Conference
2021 Berkeley arithmetic geometry RTG workshop
2024-25 Illinois algebraic geometry seminar