 | Qualifying presentation slides |
| FORMAT: JPEG/HTML I qualified for PhD candidacy in the fall of 2002. My research involves probing the equation of state of "Warm Dense Matter" ("WDM") using ultrafast lasers (of course). WDM is the temperature and density regime lying between plasma physics and condensed matter physics; it is a gray area, poorly treated by these two extremes and without a well-accepted treatment of its own. | |
| Front View | Vacuum compressor chamber |
| FORMAT: PDF Much of my summer in 2001 was spent designing a vacuum chamber for the last stage of our laser. It is now complete, and the machine shop did a wonderful job. A photo can be found in my photo album. Click below for PDFs of my assembly drawings:    | |
 | My New College Senior Thesis--Spring 2000 |
| FORMAT: PDF Coping With A Curvy Cosmos is my mostly expository work on elementary general relativity and differential geometry. Near the end, I try to say something about combinatorial methods, but I basically conclude that more work needs to be done on the subject. | |
| | LSU REU Project Writeup--Summer 1999 |
| FORMAT: LATEX2e Abstract: Outlines my work at the 1999 REU program at LSU. I searched for and found two number fields with the same zeta function but with class numbers differing by a factor of five. Examples of the class numbers of two number fields with the same zeta function differing by a small factor have been found, so if there is some maximum ratio between two such class numbers, it would certainly be quite interesting. It's generally expected that these arithmetically equivalent number fields can have class numbers differing by any integer factor, but this hasn't been proven. My adviser, Dr. Perlis, presented me with a way to produce pairs of arithmetically equivalent number fields which had some hope of differing in class number by an integer factor. I went to town calculating their class numbers using the program KANT, which had been made that year. As far as we know, I found the first example of a class number ratio of 5; examples had previously been found for 2 and 3, but the computational requirements increase very quickly as one tries to find higher and higher factors. The whole experience was really fun. | |
 | Mastermind Applet--January 1997 |
| I wrote this Mastermind game as the final project for my first Independant Study Project (ISP) at New College. I was already pretty familiar with Pascal programming, and my coding reflects that: I somewhat ignore the object-oriented nature of Java in favor of a slightly more familiar format. I probably won't be updating this program, and various new Java Virtual Machines have been reacting in unexpected ways to my code. The bugs that come up are minor, and only slightly annoying. | |
| Photo Album | Start Page |