Side Projects
AstroWiki
Astrowiki is a set of living notes I maintain on much of astrophysics, intended to supplement study for the MIT astrophysics division oral qualification exam, currently referred to as "the 168". Pictured is a graphical representation of most of the wiki, with the strongly connected nodes representing things like "compact objects" and "cosmology", though finer granularity is available too.
Practical Bayesian Sampling in Python and Julia
In this project, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are implemented in both Python and Julia and benchmarked in both serial and parallel via a parameter fitting problem. Both the user experience of implementing and using these algorithms and the raw computational performance are considered in order to form a recommendation to young scientists interested in MCMC, in particular those with existing experience in Python. It is found that MCMC algorithms run in Julia on a single core of a consumer laptop outperform almost identical implementations (and the popular package emcee) in python run on hundreds of cores on a supercomputing cluster. Report and code here
Introduction to Hermitian Young Operators
This is a pdf containing links to videos I made, introducing topics from group and representation theory in a seminar setting. This was the first of a 3 part series, with the goal of introducing Hermitian Young operators for use in physics (eg. QCD). Report here
The Combinatorics of Physical Security
This is a presentation I made for fun in a day or two over Winter break. Very casual in tone, but in my opinion it’s an interesting connection between the world of locking mechanisms and that of introductory combinatorics. Beamer talk here