A Few Serious and Not-So-Serious Things I Did as an Oliner

In four years at Olin, I did the following:

Identity, Confidence, Community: My Olin Story in Five Graphs

It's been about a month since I graduated! I'll be writing some more general reflections, including one specifically about community, but I was inspired by a conversation with a friend to draw some graphs that I thought were interesting enough to share on their own.

There are five graphs: confidence as an engineer, confidence as a mathematician, identity as an engineer, identity as a mathematician, and sense of community.

The time axis is divided into semesters and summers. My first summer was spent on the Critical Language Azerbaijani program, my second was in Singapore doing chemical engineering research, and during my third summer I was at UCLA doing applied math research in the RIPS program. I was abroad at Budapest Semesters in Mathematics during my junior fall.

All the graphs are annotated, but the annotations are pretty small; click or zoom in to read them!

To an Oliner Considering RIPS

The last day of RIPS was a week ago. It ended up being a good program for me, but I remember how unsure I was when I first got the offer and how long I considered it before saying yes. I wasn't sure what it would be like to be an engineer at RIPS, if I would end up as the team project manager because of my experience on teams (or worse, end up PMing despite not being the official PM), and whether I would end up on a project that would be interesting to me. So now, looking back, here's what I would tell another Oliner considering RIPS.

Community

The past couple of  weeks have made me think about communities of which I've been a part. There are a lot of them, and often it's the people that end up being most important to me about a place or experience. Here are a few recent moments that have really highlighted community for me.

Things I'm Learning

RIPS Midterm Presentations were a week ago, and after our midterm presentation and report, our team and sponsor agreed that the specific problem we had been working on was probably not going to lead anywhere. We'd been searching for closed forms for several values/properties related to a family of polynomials, and what we had found so far indicated that getting clean analytic results was unlikely. So we've pivoted to some more numerical and physics-related directions for the last couple of weeks of the project.


I was thinking through all of this, and I concluded that most of what I've learned falls into three categories.

"Not much is known" is quite different from "Not much has been done."

We thought we were coming into a problem on which relatively few people had worked. One of our tasks for the first part of the project was to conduct a more thorough literature review and find out how much people had looked at this family of polynomials and what they had found. It turns out that a small group of people had done significant work, simply without much success. Either the problem is very difficult, or it's simply not possible. (My team leans heavily toward the latter, though saying it's impossible is questionable because of some vagueness in the problem statement.)

"The steady state of mathematical research is to be completely stuck."

(Quote from this NYT article about Terry Tao)

I knew this quite well coming into this summer. But if there is anything this project has reinforced, it is that much of the story of doing mathematics is a lot of work resulting in not much progress. (This goes with the above, really.) Earlier this week, I walked into Mariette's office to check on something with her, and she looked at me and said, "I found the brick wall again." That's math research for you: banging your head against a brick wall, hoping at some point it will fall...so that you can move onto the next, even more exciting brick wall.

Math.

Without this project, I don't think I would have considered learning about orthogonal polynomials. Other than using a couple of nice families of them in PDEs, I'd never really seen them, and even then I didn't have to know anything about those families, just that they existed and were solutions to particular equations. But now I know so much about the theory of orthogonal polynomials, and I probably know more about Maxwell polynomials than all but maybe a couple dozen people in the world. In addition, for our new directions, I've been working on a numerical analysis part of the project. (I'm the one person on the team who knew almost zero numerical analysis... so of course I volunteered to do that bit.) In just a few days I've learned a lot about numerical analysis in general and quadrature and root-finding in particular.

Approaching Hard Problems: Math and Engineering

My friend Amelie and I have been talking about our summers, and in particular the differences in our research came up. She's on an interdisciplinary engineering team working on blimps, and I'm doing math research that has many applications but isn't really applied in and of itself. 

It turns out that my team is working on a problem that is harder than we expected. We're looking for a number of different pieces, and we've found that having any one of them would allow us to find all of them without too much work. The problem is finding one, and we're a bit stuck. There are directions that we're exploring, and we've confirmed a lot of the work that we've found in literature, but at this point it doesn't feel like we're going to be able to make much progress, and we'll probably end up pivoting to a related but more approachable problem.

Amelie's reaction when I told her this was that math research seemed pretty scary, that in her kind of research, maybe there's one way she would prefer to do things, but really she could come up with six different ways. If something doesn't work, there are other ways to accomplish the same task. But when we're stuck, we don't necessarily have that option. We try to find ideas for new approaches or information from doing more literature review and from discussions with other people, but sometimes that doesn't lead to anything helpful.

We're looking for closed forms of certain expressions, and we're not even sure they exist. We know that if they do exist, they're far from elegant, but we don't really have ideas for proving the closed forms don't exist, either. So we're reading, trying to follow lots of trails, and talking to our liaison a lot for suggestions on directions to go right now and about possibilities if this is just too intractable.

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'm going to be a senior?

My life is still mostly class projects (even more so now that MechSolids projects are about to start), though the weather is finally warming up, so I've also been spending time at Babson's baseball games. There are only three weeks of classes left, and registration was at the end of last week. It's a little weird to think that I'm already registering for senior year. Here's what I'll be up to this summer and next fall:

Summer Research

This summer I've been in Singapore, doing chemical engineering research, and I've been enjoying it a lot!

 I'm working on clathrate hydrate research at the National University of Singapore. Clathrate or gas hydrates are crystalline solids formed from water and a gas. The water forms cages that enclose the gas molecules. Different guest gas molecules result in different hydrate structure, the most common of which are structure I (sI), structure II (sII), and structure H (sH) hydrates. For example, carbon dioxide generally forms structure I hydrates, which have six small dodecahedral cages and two large tetradodecahedral cages. Hydrate formation tends to occur at low temperatures and high pressures, the kinds of conditions that you would find in permafrost or subsea regions.

Why do we care about hydrates? The biggest reason is related to the oil and gas industry. The majority of the earth's methane is in the form of methane hydrates, and we'd like to extract it. We also need to be able to prevent the formation of natural gas hydrates in pipes.

The other main application, the one to which my work is more related, is gas separation and storage, particularly of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide emissions make up around 60% of greenhouse gas emissions, but if we could capture and sequester carbon dioxide, then it wouldn't be released into the atmosphere. One solution is hydrate based gas separation. Industrial applications generally involve a mixture of gases including carbon dioxide. If we're clever about the temperatures and pressures we use, we can form hydrates in a way that is very selective for carbon dioxide. For example, fuel gas is 60 percent carbon dioxide and 40 percent hydrogen, but we can form hydrates from fuel gas in which 80 or 90 percent of the guest gas molecules are carbon dioxide. If we do a couple of cycles of forming and dissociating the hydrates, we end up with a gas that is almost entirely carbon dioxide. The hydrogen can then be combusted.

The carbon dioxide can also be stored in hydrate form in the earth; if it's injected into parts of the earth's crust with the right conditions, then the carbon dioxide will form hydrates and not be released to the atmosphere. In fact, researchers have been doing experiments on methane/carbon dioxide hydrate exchange, working on how we could replace the methane in methane hydrates with carbon dioxide so that we can use the methane gas and store the carbon dioxide in hydrate form.

There are basically three general areas that you can study when thinking about gas hydrates: thermodynamics, kinetics, and morphology. They're all pretty closely linked, and I've had the opportunity to do at least a little bit of work on each while I've been in the lab.

Future Adventures!

I know what I'm doing this summer and next fall!

Over the summer, I'll be one of about two dozen students doing engineering research at the National University of Singapore as part of the SERIUS program. My project is in the chemical engineering department with Prof. Praveen Linga's group; I'll be working on dissociation of methane from methane gas hydrates using carbon dioxide.

I'm also studying away next fall! I'll be in Budapest at Budapest Semesters in Mathematics. I've known about BSM for a long time, and I'll looking forward to spending one semester of lots of math! I won't know until a couple of weeks into the fall semester what classes I'll take, but I'm planning on taking a mix of combinatorics, algebra, and analysis as well as a Hungarian language course.

How I'm Spending My Summer

Oliners do lots of different things over the summer. It's most common to have an engineering internship or do research, at Olin or somewhere else, but there are people who are biking across the country, studying in Hungary through AIT, working at Olin in the library or for facilities or Post-Graduate Planning, teaching sailing, or working as a counselor at a summer camp.

This summer I'm living here:

Studying here:

Classroom at the Azerbaijani University of Languages

Eating this:

Gutab!

And also this:

Vegetables, bread, tomatoes, and juice

Visiting this:

Yanar Dag

Looking out my window at this:

Walking here:

The Bulvar along the Caspian Sea

And in general, learning lots of Azerbaijani and enjoying Baku!