Today’s been a pretty exciting day. Among other things, we finally used all these abstract concepts relating to modules that we’ve been developing in my algebra class to derive some really neat results: in particular, rational canonical form and Jordan canonical form for matrices that can’t be diagonalized. There’s just something about taking all this seemingly useless theory and deriving something nice (and not so obvious) that you can actually use from it that’s very satisfying. Hey, I may even blog about it at some point. Another interesting math idea today was the subject of a colloquium that I wasn’t able to attend (but found out a good deal about from those who did): can we hear the shape of a drum? (Among other things, the question ties in with work done by our Dean, NASA’s WMAP project/this PRL, and the general notion of inverse problems such as those people deal with in things like MRI). And of course, my abstract algebra recitation session turned into me arguing with my TA (an algebraic geometer) and a computer scientist about why statistical mechanics is The Coolest Thing ever. What can I say? Never get me started on statistical mechanics - it’s just such a gorgeous subject, and I can’t get enough of it.
Anyway, while the math colloquium was going on, I was off at today’s physics colloquium by Prof. Charles Marcus of Harvard University, something I’ve been looking forward to for a good deal of time now. And what a talk it was: although I would have preferred more technical details, the talk catered to a pretty general audience, and it was perhaps the clearest physics talk I’ve been to in a long time. He started off by reviewing the history of computation (from the Antikythera mechanism of 150 BC to the first integrated circuit, 50-ish years ago), noting that quantum information processing is really a new paradigm in this history (to paraphrase, the parallelism in computation implied by the multiplicity of states inherent in quantum mechanics is something that hasn’t really been possible till now) and surveying recent developments in solid-state implementations of controllable qubits from his lab. Most of the relevant papers are on his lab webpage (linked above), and a lot of the technical details are presented in this talk he gave at KITP in 2006, although he did present some very recent data pertaining to this paper. All in all, a very cool talk - I especially like the terminology in this field, what with the ‘Zamboni’ effect and ‘bucket brigades’.
I can’t wait for next month’s colloquium - David Nelson will be speaking!
1 response so far ↓
Saurabh // March 17, 2007 at 5:26 pm
Yes, “clearest” is a good word to describe the talk. It was amazing to see him show how wonderful physics could be done using just a two-state system. Simple is usually beautiful because it is also fundamental. A very-well written blog, and thanks for the links.
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