Are you a scientist? Mathematician? What do you study and current research?

[BronyPony 575]

Does engineering count?

 

Im only in high school at present, but Im studying advanced robotics technologies and manufacturing technologies. I just recently finished an internship with Sikorsky Helicopter, and I fully intend to get into the transportation industry! 

 

Also, Im in AP Physics, and I study a lot of things in that class, but I really enjoy studying electric fields and circuits, as well as electromagnetism and digital physics. 

If it involves science or mathematics, it works.  There are exceptions to the parameters, but what you do is within the parameter lines.

[SasQ 1,355]

Is there any reward for proving that Collatz conjecture? I have some thoughts about how could it be proven. It's quite interesting that so many so simple-looking problems in Mathematics are still without proof/solution, isn't it?

As to the main topic: I consider myself scientist, a Renaissance-type one: I'm interested in everything, from mathematics and geometry, through physics (especially quantum physics, but not the mainstream version), biochemistry, ancient history & alphabets, symbology, psychology, cognitive science, computer science, programming languages etc. I wrote more about that in other thread, when explaining my cutie mark 

[Viking 60]

I study general biology alot, most interesting to me is mammals. I like to see how different each critter is in habits from others, even strange stuff such as most sloths will climb down to the ground and bury its droppings so the smell won't attract predators. And some canines make burrows specifically for breeding or child care.

[truth is life 76]

I'm currently working on a Ph.D. in physics (just got passed the "quals" and got accepted as a candidate, currently working on setting up a dissertation committee). As a matter of fact, I'm working on that most stereotypically physicist sort of thing, particle physics, despite my school being much more into solid-state physics (superconductors, solar cells, new materials, things like that); I'm a collaborator on a major neutrino experiment (there are one or two hundred people like that, so it's not a hugely prestigious thing or anything).

 

Funnily enough, though, what the particular subgroup of the collaboration I'm in is working on is not actually neutrino-related in any direct sense. Instead, we're using the equipment and data taken to study something else entirely: muons and muon-induced isotope formation. See, when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere they produce these secondary particles, muons, which are light, fast, and highly penetrating. They're a big part of why if you look at neutrino experiments or dark matter experiments or other experiments that are looking at rare events, they're usually built deep underground in mines, like Kamiokande or occasionally in highway tunnels like Gran Sasso. By burying the experiment under hundreds of meters of rock, a lot of those muons can be filtered out, meaning they're less likely to hit your experiment and mimic a signal. Even with that, though, there's a significant muon rate in most experiments, so it's useful to understand how these muons behave in your specific experiment so you can filter that rogue data out. As part of that, we're working on our experiment's software to improve how it models--we call it "reconstructing," from the data--muons passing through the various systems designed (or, in one case, not designed but able to) detect them.

 

And it's not just the muons themselves that can cause trouble. They can interact with atoms in your experiment and knock them apart--sometimes, they'll just knock off a neutron, sometimes they'll knock a bigger atom into pieces and produce a whole host of secondary, exotic atomic isotopes, like lithium-9 or helium-8. The decay of those isotopes can itself mimic signals, especially in some cases if mixed with the original muon event. Again, it's useful to better understand the characteristics of this rogue isotope production so that you can better isolate its effect on whatever it is that you're actually interested in, like neutrino oscillations (which is what our experiment was built for). This isn't hugely new ground, as there have been previous experiments that had similar analyses published on them, such as KamLAND, but the data we're looking at has already been taken, and it never hurts to refine existing measurements.

 

In practice, what this mostly boils down to is writing a lot of software and working on a lot of code. For instance, today I mostly tried to figure out how a bash script written by someone else in our collaboration worked so that I could ask him some meaningful questions about it and hopefully understand some of our analysis software better so I could start working on it myself. Unfortunately, I've gotten really rusty at programming since high school computer science, so I probably spend more time teaching myself C++ and python (which are what our analysis software is written in) than anything else. I expect that will clear itself up in time, though.

 

I'm also a titanic space nerd, but that's not really being a scientist...

[FractalMoon 378]

I'm more into Law than science or mathmatics, but I've always been fascinated by the principles behind magnetic weapons. If I had the resources, I would build a railgun as a summer project. Not as any sort of dangerous thing, just because it's fun.

[BronyPony 575]

Is there any reward for proving that Collatz conjecture? I have some thoughts about how could it be proven. It's quite interesting that so many so simple-looking problems in Mathematics are still without proof/solution, isn't it?

 

As to the main topic: I consider myself scientist, a Renaissance-type one: I'm interested in everything, from mathematics and geometry, through physics (especially quantum physics, but not the mainstream version), biochemistry, ancient history & alphabets, symbology, psychology, cognitive science, computer science, programming languages etc. I wrote more about that in other thread, when explaining my cutie mark 

Money and the fact that you will be brought down into the history books for solving a difficult problem. It is difficult to prove because of the infinite possibilities. The way I am proving it is to define a finite subset to cover an infinite set. I developed Collatz Numbers which are involved in the proof, but still am working on the problem.

 

Here is an algorithm that I am using to develop an evolution simulator derived from Collatz Theory:

 

 

http://youtu.be/RNRB_dmMy-w

Edited July 2, 2013 by BronyPony