Projects & Research

I like to build tools and write computer programs to better understand the world.
All projects on this page are individually authored by me unless otherwise noted.

S&P 500 Components

I processed monthly stock returns from Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS) of 1400 individual companies that have joined or left the S&P 500 index since 1960. From the data I analyzed average monthly returns 12-months before and after companies join and leave the S&P 500. An additional chart was created to show cumulative stock returns before joining the index, while being a component, and after leaving the index.

Tech Internship Heatmap

I processed a prominent job board with 12,000 tech internship posts for 2026 and created a heatmap of North America, showing the cities and states with the most internship roles. The interactive map can be filtered by role (swe/hardware/quant/ML), time of year (summer/off-season), and region.

Bay Area Transit

This is an interactive map visualizing station-level ridership in 2025 across across three transit agencies in the San Francisco Bay Area: BART, Caltrain, and Capitol Corridor in June 2025. It models ridership redistribution that could result from BART's proposed closure of 15 stations in 2027, as well as Caltrain also possibly closing stations.

GraphLangZ

GraphLangZ is a configuration language I wrote in 2024 that allows you to quickly describe directed/undirected graphs with simple syntax, render it quickly, and share it with ease. The rendered image shown above is a course dependency graph for Dartmouth computer science classes, visualizing the prerequsite relationships and categorizing each class.

Raytracer

In 2024 I programmed a raytracer to render spheres, planes, and cubes. Features include antialiasing, soft reflections via area lights, blurred reflections, and multiprocessing. The code is written in the V programming language and scenes for the raytracer are specified in a JSON file.

Additional Projects

Hex Minesweeper

Hex Minesweeper is a variant of the classic Minesweeper video game from the 1990s where instead of playing on a square board, it's a hexagon board!

Timetable Monitor

A script that web scrapes Dartmouth's Timetable of Class Meetings using Puppeteer JS to see which courses have open seats. It only searches for classes I specified that I'm intrested in, ignoring other results.

Solar Simulation

A solar system simulation I wrote using Newtonian mechanics that provides an analysis on planetary retrograde and explains lack of visible parallax.

Crossword Creator

A crossword generator that makes a crossword with words from any given word list and can add filler words.

Lego Mosaic Designer

This tool converts user-uploaded photos into pixelated LEGO mosaic blueprints. Each blueprint includes detailed instructions and a parts list to build it with real LEGOs.

Box Filter (BXTR)

An online art tool that adds gridlines to images, crops to fit A4/US Letter size paper, and flattens the image background. It's great at scanning photographs of paper drawings to convert them to digital art; I use it in my artwork.

Nodal Shapes

This is digital greeting card software that animates complete graphs of circles, squares, hearts, stars and triangles, with or without text.

Website designed and programmed by Arthur Zarins.