This Blog

After boldly proclaiming that I am Boba Fett it seems appropriate to introduce the real me, or at least how I see myself, and talk a bit about what this blog is. Going on a diatribe about myself sounds narcissistic and silly, especially since there are only about ten visitors per week (although it was much higher during the competition). So rather, I'll try and layout a few of my qualities that I hope will at least seed the topics of this blog.

From an early age I was fascinated by numbers. Apparently I did pretty well on some standardized tests when I was little because my parents accelerated me in math programs and I can recall being in a something called "project think" in middle school when I lived in West Texas. From the my discovery of the "variable" beyond, my love of mathematics grew. In Middle School I competed all over Texas in all types of Math competitions like mental math, math olympiad and I was one of the best in the calculator competition (calculator of choice: TI-86). For a few years I became intensely interested in fractals and Chaos Theory after reading Gleick's book and others. During that time I can recall being amazed by a chaotic waterwheel I saw at a science fair and feeling blown away by the simplistic complexity of the logistic equation and Mandelbrot set. Once, I ran into my parents bedroom late at night when I programmed my TI-86 to plot and explore the logistic map (seen above). The observation of self similarity is something I am very fond of and will discuss at length in a future post. By the way, self similarity is certainly a profitable concept in the world of market price analysis. Aronofsky's film Pi remains one of my favorites and it has always been a dream of mine to make films with strong mathematical influences, maybe I'll write about a few of those ideas in the future. Sometime in middle school I came up with "pythagoruz" as an AIM alias, then a hotmail account, and now it is my internet persona in various disciplines, anywhere you see it, thats me.

I'm now 24, have degrees in electrical engineering and physics from UCSB and am working on a Ph.D in materials science at UIUC. In my research I look at very small scale crystal structure ("nanocrystals" or quantum dots) and aim to control the growth geometry. I'll talk more about this later, but it basically involves chemistry and 3D geometry(see TEM image at the end). My favorite subject in Physics was Relativity at one point but has since changed to Quantum Mechanics because of the beautiful mathematical construct created around QM. I am also an active trader with an eye for reading charts, you can find out more about that at Stock Geometry. Also, you may have noticed that I recently competed in a auto-trading software competition using this site as a venue for posting trades. In my experience, all good traders have a eye for spotting patterns and a comfort with numbers.

In short, I love to talk and think about mathematics, always have. Over the years I have met others like me and the internet has provided a great venue for such topics. So while I may digress, e.g. Star Wars, the idea here is to celebrate the beauty of mathematics, not unlike Pythagoras and his Pythagoreans did the 500's BC. I would love to get feedback along the way and get some discussions going so please feel free to comment with any thoughts or suggestions you have. From wiki:

Pythagoras and his students believed that everything was related to mathematics and that numbers were the ultimate reality and, through mathematics, everything could be predicted and measured in rhythmic patterns or cycles. According to Iamblichus, Pythagoras once said that "number is the ruler of forms and ideas and the cause of gods and demons."

I took this image of some Iron Oxide nanocrystals i made a few weeks ago. They formed a ring as the solvent evaporated off the thin carbon film on which they rest for transmission electron microscopy(TEM). Can you see the self similarity?