Thomas Draper

About

I am a third-year PhD student at CMU, advised by Feras Saad. I have broad interests in probabilistic algorithms, information, computation, and intelligence. I completed my undergraduate degree at Brigham Young University with majors in math, physics, computer science, and statistics. In my free time, I like to play piano, smash, or study language.

Publications

• Space-Entropy Lower Bounds for Random Sampling
  Thomas Draper, Feras Saad.
  Preprint, 2026.

• Online Random Sampling with Real Probabilities
  Thomas Draper, David Harris, Feras Saad.
  Preprint, 2026.

• Efficient Online Random Sampling via Randomness Recycling
  Thomas Draper, Feras Saad.
  Proceedings of the 2026 Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA).
  (link) | (arXiv) | (blog) | (slides) | (code)

• Efficient Rejection Sampling in the Entropy-Optimal Range
  Thomas Draper, Feras Saad.
  IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2026.
  (link) | (arXiv) | (code)

• Language, information, and quantum theory
  Thomas Draper, advised by Jean-Francois Van Huele.
  BYU physics senior thesis, 2024.

• Question answering on quantum computers
  Thomas Draper.
  Journal of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, & Letters, 2024.

• Nilpotent polynomials and nilpotent coefficients
  Thomas Draper, Pace Nielsen, Janez Šter.
  Journal of Algebra, 2022.
  (link) | (preprint)