SCOPE Stories Week 21: It's a Boa Constrictor Digesting an Elephant

Through the process of trying to change some of the properties of a particular stent in order to test a stent with our desired characteristics, we managed to pretty badly damage a stent. In this case, by "damage" I mean that we caused the stent to stay in deformed shapes instead of trying to regain its rest state.

We had a lot of fun with this.

At one point, one of my teammates pushed the wires into a shape and asked, "How would you mathematically describe this?" We debated for a little while -- kind of like a Gaussian, kind of like e^{-x}? Then Brian, our faculty advisor, said, "It looks like a snake swallowed something," at which point my teammate and I looked at each other and said, "It swallowed an elephant!"

After that, of course we had to fill the stent with runts candy to actually get it into a shape that really matched the Little Prince drawing.

(On a more serious note, we think we're actually going to get data soon, both from collecting it ourselves and from BoSci. Also, we've started on the final report. How is that already happening?)

Faculty Searching

I'm missing SCOPE for two weeks in a row to go on grad school visits to New York City...twice. (Yes, I probably should have planned this a little better.) As I won't have any SCOPE stories this week or next, I thought I'd say a little bit about something else I've been spending time on: Olin's faculty search.

Olin's calls for faculty applicants are here. It's a very broad search, which makes it really exciting to interact with all the candidates who come to campus. I've gotten to hear about a huge variety of topics over the past month or so just by going to the faculty candidate talks.

Faculty Searching

I'm missing SCOPE for two weeks in a row to go on grad school visits to New York City...twice. (Yes, I probably should have planned this a little better.) As I won't have any SCOPE stories this week or next, I thought I'd say a little bit about something else I've been spending time on: Olin's faculty search.

Olin's calls for faculty applicants are here. It's a very broad search, which makes it really exciting to interact with all the candidates who come to campus. I've gotten to hear about a huge variety of topics over the past month or so just by going to the faculty candidate talks.

SCOPE Stories Week 18: Sine's a Nice Function

Today was the end of a three-week sprint after having no SCOPE last week due to an Olin Monday  on Wednesday. This is also my last SCOPE day before spring break; I'm missing the next two for grad school visits. We spent today doing a lot of technical work -- finishing up development of a model, cleaning up numerics in the implementation of an old model, testing, and working on the user interface.

My accomplishment for today: simplifying some work I'd done earlier this week by talking to one of my teammates and our advisor, finding a mistake, and figuring out that a particular sine series has a very convenient sum. (I'm still trying to think about why, but hey, evenly spaced things are nice.)

SCOPE Stories Week 17: Nitinol in the Snow

For the past few days the temperature outside has been hovering around 0 C, and while going between buildings with one of our stents, the Materials Science major on the team noticed that the stent started acting abnormally.

See, this stent is made of nitinol, which is a shape memory alloy. When you deform it, it returns to its original shape, usually pretty quickly. So we bend the stent, and it bounces back. We compress it, and it elongates again, not deforming at all. But when my teammate took the stent outside, the outside temperature was below one of the transition temperatures for nitinol. She bent the stent, and it was cold enough that the stent stayed bent.

Of course, once we figured this out, we all had to go outside for ten minutes with a bunch of different nitinol stents and try this. It's fantastic. And then as we went back inside, the stents slowly warmed up and returned to their original shape.

Conclusions: nitinol is cool, temperature matters, and we're easily entertained by basic materials science.

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.