My Studies - 2007
My honours year at the University of Cape
Town started
early with me doing vacation work for Prof. Jean Cleymans. The work
involved programming a a method to calculate the rapidity distributions
of particles that are created
after a heavy ion collision. Starting this early in the year allowed me
to finish the
project by the end of the first semester.
Since the honours projects typically take place in the second semester I thus had some free time to fill. In July I will be starting another project with Professor Kevin Naidoo of the computational chemistry department working on course grain simulations of carbohydrates.
I was also given the oppertunity by Professor Francesco Petruccione to attend a lecture series that he had organized at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The lecture series was titled "Quantum Shannon Theory" and was presented by Dr. Aram Harrow from the University of Bristol. It allowed me to gain an introductory knowledge in the subjects of quantum computing and quantum information theory. While I was there I also witnessed the only application of quantum key distributions in action in South Africa. Kinda cool I thought.
The second half of the year started off with my working again for Professor Naidoo in Computational Chemistry. I developed an extension to CHARMM to store interaction potentials based on molecules' relative orientation and distance apart. This was to be able to calculate the potential of mean force parameterised by relative orientation and distance. This turned out not to be enough (I should have realised this from the start), so now I going to incorporate relative position and orientation. Six parameters, which means 6D cubic splines.
My studies ended well this year, though I don't have any marks yet. UCT Physics being who they are does not release marks for individual courses so I'll only a single mark to reflects all my hard work through the year. In 2007 the average over all my marks came to 90% in the dot. This placed me second in the class (first was 91% and third was 76%0. My list of courses were:
Quantum Mechanics, Classical Mechanics, Statistical Mechanice, Classical Electrodynamics, General Relativity 1, Functional Analysis, Mathematical Physics 1, Particle Physics, Relativistic Quantum Mechanics, General Relativity 2 and Cosmology, Mathematical Computing, Computational Physics and Non-Linear Optimisation.
I also wrote my GRE's this year. For the general GRE I got 660 for Verbal and 800 for Quantitative. I'm still awaiting Physics results and analytic writing results.
Since the honours projects typically take place in the second semester I thus had some free time to fill. In July I will be starting another project with Professor Kevin Naidoo of the computational chemistry department working on course grain simulations of carbohydrates.
I was also given the oppertunity by Professor Francesco Petruccione to attend a lecture series that he had organized at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The lecture series was titled "Quantum Shannon Theory" and was presented by Dr. Aram Harrow from the University of Bristol. It allowed me to gain an introductory knowledge in the subjects of quantum computing and quantum information theory. While I was there I also witnessed the only application of quantum key distributions in action in South Africa. Kinda cool I thought.
The second half of the year started off with my working again for Professor Naidoo in Computational Chemistry. I developed an extension to CHARMM to store interaction potentials based on molecules' relative orientation and distance apart. This was to be able to calculate the potential of mean force parameterised by relative orientation and distance. This turned out not to be enough (I should have realised this from the start), so now I going to incorporate relative position and orientation. Six parameters, which means 6D cubic splines.
My studies ended well this year, though I don't have any marks yet. UCT Physics being who they are does not release marks for individual courses so I'll only a single mark to reflects all my hard work through the year. In 2007 the average over all my marks came to 90% in the dot. This placed me second in the class (first was 91% and third was 76%0. My list of courses were:
Quantum Mechanics, Classical Mechanics, Statistical Mechanice, Classical Electrodynamics, General Relativity 1, Functional Analysis, Mathematical Physics 1, Particle Physics, Relativistic Quantum Mechanics, General Relativity 2 and Cosmology, Mathematical Computing, Computational Physics and Non-Linear Optimisation.
I also wrote my GRE's this year. For the general GRE I got 660 for Verbal and 800 for Quantitative. I'm still awaiting Physics results and analytic writing results.