SCOPE Stories Week 16: Matrices and Springs

The beginning of the SCOPE semester has been a little rough. After deciding that we weren't going to continue pursuing some paths we'd considered, we've rearranged team roles, so there's been an adjustment period for that. It's also going to be a few weeks before we have the data we were planning to use to drive our main modeling work for this semester and to validate last semester's work. We're trying to both reshuffle our schedule to frontload everything that doesn't rely on data and start on some of the modeling work even without the intuition from the data.

This has involved reading some books and papers in fields with which none of us is familiar. Two of us spent far too long trying to make sense of a couple of pages of a book that were filled with entries of three different but related matrices, starting with one that nothing on the internet seems to explain. Also, one paper refers to the work in the area of research we're looking at as "sparse and not complete." Thanks, random paper; that makes us feel so confident that we'll figure something out.

Luckily, when Brian visited he suggested we start by approximating everything with springs, and that was easy to work out. We're taking some data on our own while we wait for the more comprehensive data sets, so hopefully we'll know within the next couple of weeks whether that simple a model is effective or not.

The Joy of the Joint Meetings

The Joint Mathematics Meetings are a large annual math conference, so named because they are the joint annual meeting of the Mathematical Association of America and the American Mathematical Society (and have significant participation from several other societies/associations). This year was my eighth JMM, and I love them every year. JMM was last week, and some of my friends expressed confusion at my great enthusiasm for the meetings, so I thought I'd try to explain a bit.

Reflections on Senior Fall

I was originally enrolled in eighteen credits this semester, but after three or four weeks, I dropped down to fourteen. It was a decision I was pretty upset about because I dropped a class that I enjoyed and was taking for fun, but it was the right choice. I had underestimated how much time and effort grad school and scholarship/fellowship apps were going to take, and both SCOPE and Mechanical Design regularly took more than twelve hours a week each. I've had Olin classes take that much time before, but I'd never had two at once, and the fact that both were built around team projects (and thus team meetings) just made it worse. After I dropped BioTransport  (Transport in Biological Systems), some weeks were still rough, but I didn't constantly feel overwhelmed anymore. And between BioTransport and NLDC (Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos), dropping BioTransport was definitely the better choice.

Below the fold I'll talk about what I did this semester (apart from SCOPE, which is still in progress):

SCOPE Stories Week 13: Midyear Presentation

This week we presented at Boston Scientific!

The presentation went really well. BoSci is pretty happy with the work we've done and the direction we're going. There were more people at the presentation than we expected, and they asked some helpful questions and gave us some good ideas about what work they thought was most worth pursuing. They also asked us about whether our model could handle a feature we had just found out about... and the answer, happily, was yes!

Also, from today, this is a picture of a very happy product owner with our 51 page double-sided midyear report, two thirds of which is derivation/code appendices:

There's a little bit of work that we'll do next week so that everything is set up well for January, but for the most part, SCOPE is done for the semester.

On Math

tl;dr: Maybe we should teach math as math.

I sent out an email earlier this semester looking for students to join the graph theory research group. Joseph and I are both graduating in May, so we want to have some non-graduating students in the group next semester.

I got thirteen replies. From Olin students, I got thirteen replies. I've had two people later talk to me expressing interest.

We have both math and coding projects next semester, and a few people are definitely more interested in the programming side. While many others are interested in both and some of them might lean coding, part of what would make the project cool for them is that they think the math is exciting, as well. So essentially, I sent out an email asking if anyone wanted to do math research without many direct applications, and more than four percent of Olin said yes. (And we excluded the 25-30% of the school graduating in December or May as well as the tenth or so that will be abroad/on leave next semester!)

I know that's not a huge percentage of Olin, but that's fifteen non-seniors who would like to make room in their schedule to do mathematics, mathematics that might not get anywhere, mathematics for which we don't yet have answers, new mathematics. And that's enough to make me think, even more than I already did, that we do Oliners a disservice when we hide math away.

SCOPE Stories Week 12: T-shirts

From about 10:15 to 10:45 on Wednesday morning, the SCOPE teams floated in and out of their work spaces to look at the proposed SCOPE t-shirt designs. Well, okay, most of us actually emerged from our spaces to eat donuts, but the donuts were successful as a bribe to get us to look at the designs everyone had proposed. Each team had been required to submit at least one design, and several teams had come up with more.

One design was ridiculously intricate and included a reference to every team. One of my favorites was a simple design that just said, "Trust me, I'm (almost) an engineer." We'll see what ends up winning. I think the idea of a SCOPE t-shirt is a little odd, but it's a tradition.

Other than that, things were pretty quiet. Brian gave us comments on our first report draft, and I spent most of the day implementing those. We went through the outline of our presentation with him as well, and we'll do a full run through on Sunday. Our mid-year presentation at Boston Scientific is next Wednesday afternoon. Our mid-year report is due next Friday, and then we'll be done with SCOPE for the semester.

It's a little weird to be (almost) halfway done.

Thanksgiving Break Adventures

I'm going to see family for Thanksgiving, but I actually haven't left yet because I've been up to a couple of other things! First, I took a quick trip to Toronto, and then there was a fluid dynamics conference in town!