A Few Summer Pictures

I've been away from Olin for almost a month and a half, so I thought I'd post about what I've been up to! Pictures below the fold.

I was home in Oklahoma for three and a half weeks, and while there I got to see some fantastic college softball at the Women's College World Series.

Women's College World Series in Oklahoma City. Our seats were in the centerfield bleachers for most of the games. I went to (at least part of) seven games and was very happy to see the Florida Gators win.

In June, my dad and I went to Omaha with my grandparents to watch college baseball at the Men's College World Series. We've been talking about going to Omaha for a long time, and it was a lot of fun!

Men's College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska. Our seats were all over the place. Left field line, right field line, and once right behind home plate. We were there for every team's first games and then the second games on one side of the bracket. I've grown up as a TCU fan, so getting to see them win was especially exciting.

They're a little hard to see in this picture, but there are several beach balls being tossed around (and two more have ended up on the field). This happened between pretty much every half inning.

The day after getting home from Omaha, I left for the Annual Conference of the New England Conference of the United Methodist Church. I wrote a few blog posts about Conference, the first of which is here. Overall, I enjoyed AC, though parts of it were really frustrating.

I flew straight from Annual Conference in New Hampshire to the Research in Industrial Projects for Students math research program at UCLA. I'm on the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory team. The four of us are working on a problem about orthogonal polynomials with applications to numerical methods, which then have applications to a lot of chemical and physical problems, though LLNL is most interested in applications to plasma physics for models of experiments at the National Ignition Facility. We have by far the most pure-math-ish of the nine RIPS projects.

My office at RIPS! On my team, we each have offices to ourselves.

Starting to get familiar with Maxwell polynomials. This was before I figured out that some things equal 0 to make this all so much easier. Also before I started using Mathematica.

I love theme and amusement parks, and the LA area has a bunch. I'm trying to get to all of them in the next couple of months, and I started that quest by going to Universal Studios with a couple of other RIPS students last Saturday. Universal Creative does really incredible things with incorporating 3D video into rides or motion simulators. It's not my favorite kind of attraction, but I have to appreciate it when it's done so very well.

At the entrance to Universal! It's their 50th anniversary, I think, but they're making far less out of that than Disneyland is making out of their 60th.

On the Studio Tour with a fellow RIPS student.

Minions. So many minions, and beautiful theming (this is a transition from a Napoleonic Era France area of the park to Despicable Me Super Silly Fun Land).