Youwen Wu

Greetings. I’m Youwen. I study math and hack on computers at UC Santa Barbara.

I’m a member of the MIT OpenCompute Laboratory and benevolent dictator at functor.systems.

Here is my GitHub, university transcript, CV/resume, and a picture of my cats.

I am interested in the nPOV and how we can apply higher structures to solve hard problems. In general, I prefer to use free-as-in-freedom software. Right now I’m working on functorOS, an experimental NixOS-based Linux distribution—among other things.

In my spare time, I play guitar and spend too much money on guitar pedals. I also hate coding.

I occasionally attend hackathons for fun. Most recently, I won the grand prize at HackMIT 2025.

See my about page for more about myself, or my now page for what I’m up to right now. Or explore the other pages on this website. Just for fun, my favorite songs and tools.

Is the world alive, is it a single living thing? If it is, in the sense I meant, then its primary job is to survive, and to survive it’ll have to make decisions. So there I was in my living room thinking, “oh my god, we’ve got to steer this thing!”
— David Spivak