Mathematics and Statistics

Applied Mathematics, Geometry and Topology, Analysis, Mathematical Modeling, Statistical Modeling, Game Theory, Operations, Biostatistics, Epidemiology, GIS, Image Processing

Let’s hear more from the women who leave academia (Part 2)

Kaitlin Alexander Environmental and Earth Sciences, Mathematics and Statistics
After the publication of my previous post, I received an email from Dr Sian Grigg, who decided to leave academia following the completion of her PhD. Read on below to hear her story. Dear Kaitlin Thanks for thinking of us who did not continue! I have often thought about this question and still wonder, after 15 years, whether I should have tried harder to pursue a career in academia. And whether I might now try…

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Let’s hear more from the women who leave academia.

Kaitlin Alexander Environmental and Earth Sciences, Mathematics and Statistics
“On International Women’s Day”, I wrote on 8 March, “why don’t we instead highlight women who left the workforce due to structural barriers? The current approach is a bit “let’s celebrate the women who navigated this broken system to distract from the fact that it’s broken”.” So far, I have been one of the women who is “celebrated” on days like this, with social media campaigns showcasing the work of women in science. I am…

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Pick a State, Any State

jeremy Communication, Education and Outreach, Mathematics and Statistics, Physics and Astronomy
Hilbert space is big. No, not big like the how the Earth is big compared to you. Rather, Hilbert space is astronomically big. Actually, that’s not quite right either. It’s bigger than that. I guess the best adverb I can use is that it’s mathematically big. In a Hilbert space, you tend to have a lot of room to maneuver. (To read more about that, check out my essay, “The Curse of Dimensionality”.) In the…

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All in the Corners

jeremy Communication, Education and Outreach, Mathematics and Statistics, Physics and Astronomy
As a quantum theorist, I spend a lot of time thinking about high-dimensional spaces. These are the playgrounds for quantum many-body systems, and they are vast. The technical name is a Hilbert space, and it’s the space of complex vectors with the additional structure of a way to put vectors together (called an inner product). Hilbert space is big (see “The Curse of Dimensionality”), but the usable area for quantum theory is often much smaller.…

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Jeremy Côté 2020-11-22 09:42:29

jeremy Communication, Education and Outreach, Mathematics and Statistics, Physics and Astronomy
How to pick a random unit vector. As a quantum theorist, I spend a lot of time thinking about high-dimensional spaces. These are the playgrounds for quantum many-body systems, and they are vast. The technical name is a Hilbert space, and it’s the space of complex vectors with the additional structure of a way to put vectors together (called an inner product). Hilbert space is big (see “The Curse of Dimensionality”), but the usable area…

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The Curse of Dimensionality

jeremy Communication, Education and Outreach, Mathematics and Statistics, Physics and Astronomy
From combinatorics to many-body quantum systems. If there’s one field of mathematics that everyone encounters in their daily life, I would argue that it’s combinatorics (with perhaps geometry being the other one). The rules of combinatorics cast a shadow over our lives. They affect how we make decisions and form the scaffolding for how options in our lives are displayed to us. In this essay, I want to explore the idea which is known as…

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Physics On A Cube

jeremy Communication, Education and Outreach, Mathematics and Statistics, Physics and Astronomy
One of my favourite mathematical pieces of writing is Flatland, by Edwin Abbott Abbott (the book is in the public domain, so you can download it from Wikipedia). Published over a century ago, it’s a story1 involving residents (Flatlanders) who live in a two-dimensional world. Without giving too much of the story away (because you should seriously read it!), the inhabitants find themselves shocked when a strange shape dips into their world. That other “shape”…

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A Game of Loops

jeremy Communication, Education and Outreach, Mathematics and Statistics, Physics and Astronomy
When I hear the word “quantum”, I think of all the misconceptions and crazy ideas people associate with it in a lot of popular media. Physicists are great (and terrible) at coming up with names, and the word “quantum” is such an example of a word with a lot of baggage attached. Pair it with the word “computer”, however, and the misconceptions skyrocket, sometimes turning into full-blown hype. The reality (at the time of this…

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PSIon

jeremy Communication, Education and Outreach, Mathematics and Statistics, Physics and Astronomy
In my final year of undergrad, I had a plan: go to the university near my house, begin my master’s degree, and eventually do a PhD. It was nice, simple, and straightforward. Not having a ton of people around me applying for graduate school, I wasn’t aware of how big a deal the choice of institution was, nor the fact that some people apply to ten or more schools (often for those looking to go…

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Talking, typing, and the social model of disability

Kaitlin Alexander Environmental and Earth Sciences, Mathematics and Statistics
I wrote this article for Redefining Stammering, an excellent blog run by Sam Simpson (a speech therapist) and Patrick Campbell (a doctor and person who stammers). If you have an interest in stammering or disability theory, I encourage you to check out their work, and particularly their recent book Stammering Pride and Prejudice. When I was in primary school, I had a teacher who was over-enthusiastic about the virtues of touch-typing. Over the years, he…

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