School or College
College of the Pacific
Department
Chemistry
Location
William Knox Holt Memorial Library and Learning Center
Description
A sabbatical is supposed to be about having the space to do the research you would usually not be able to get to. My plan was to wander around in 2D spaces, selling my ideas to other groups, connecting my projects with theirs, and connecting myself with their grad students (for both short- and long-term gain). Well, my physical space became limited to that of a spare bedroom, but it was quiet. And, fortunately, I am a theorist.
I spent my pre-tenure years investing heavily in specific way of re-writing the equations that dictate how electrons behave, which should be more amenable to producing high-quality solutions even for quite large (non-conducting) systems. The method was usable but it had some unexpected artifacts, unfortunately coming from things that I discovered were baked into the foundational formalism. Before my sabbatical, I understood the problem but did not even have a toe-hold on the solution. Hundreds of pages of scrap paper later, I think I have emerged with the solution, and it has a very interesting structure of its own. Numerical tests lie still in the future, so the best I can do at this point is show you the equations and their modifications.
In case you would like something prettier to look at, I also made major upgrades in a long-standing side project, which is animation software. The package lets one describe animations in pretty standard python syntax, thereby allowing the user to harness the full power of python (and their knowledge of it, which is a widespread skill) to bring to life processes that they can describe in algorithmic terms, but for which no standard plotting or other visualization tool is sufficient. The code has been released publicly and can be found at https://github.com/adutoi/PyToon.The basic difficulty with learning anything in science is the abstraction barrier; now I can finally get to work making the animations that I hope will help students see the unseeable.
Sabbaticals Are About Space...Sometimes Vector Space
William Knox Holt Memorial Library and Learning Center
A sabbatical is supposed to be about having the space to do the research you would usually not be able to get to. My plan was to wander around in 2D spaces, selling my ideas to other groups, connecting my projects with theirs, and connecting myself with their grad students (for both short- and long-term gain). Well, my physical space became limited to that of a spare bedroom, but it was quiet. And, fortunately, I am a theorist.
I spent my pre-tenure years investing heavily in specific way of re-writing the equations that dictate how electrons behave, which should be more amenable to producing high-quality solutions even for quite large (non-conducting) systems. The method was usable but it had some unexpected artifacts, unfortunately coming from things that I discovered were baked into the foundational formalism. Before my sabbatical, I understood the problem but did not even have a toe-hold on the solution. Hundreds of pages of scrap paper later, I think I have emerged with the solution, and it has a very interesting structure of its own. Numerical tests lie still in the future, so the best I can do at this point is show you the equations and their modifications.
In case you would like something prettier to look at, I also made major upgrades in a long-standing side project, which is animation software. The package lets one describe animations in pretty standard python syntax, thereby allowing the user to harness the full power of python (and their knowledge of it, which is a widespread skill) to bring to life processes that they can describe in algorithmic terms, but for which no standard plotting or other visualization tool is sufficient. The code has been released publicly and can be found at https://github.com/adutoi/PyToon.The basic difficulty with learning anything in science is the abstraction barrier; now I can finally get to work making the animations that I hope will help students see the unseeable.
