In the morning on October 6, I was still asleep when I received an email from Greg Scholes, Chair of Department of Chemistry at Princeton: David MacMillan wins Nobel Prize. My first reaction was to shout out: “Holy jeez!” and I jumped out of bed…
A generalization of Henderson’s theorem (Henderson R. L., Phys. Lett. 1974) is that shows to recover interaction parameters, the entire radial distribution function can be redundant, what is needed is just the ensemble averages of a few “descriptors” of the equilibrium configuration. Please click “download”…
This is the third part of a presentation that I am going to give on “1866-1874: the beautiful years of Gaston Darboux”. Because I write the parts backwards, please expect the first and the second parts to come out later… Since the 1980s historical studies…
A ring is a very creepy being in algebra. In some strange rings we have ab=0 without either a=0 or b=0. This can make equations like x^2-5x+6=0 have more than 2 roots 🙂
“Euclid, what the hell are you doing?!” As a 14-year-old student struggling with my geometry problem sets in secondary school, I was staring at the heavy white brick in front of me, scattered with crazy shapes in ink that only became crazier as I scanned through…
In my summer internship I need to design water clusters: structure made solely of water molecules. I am using FORTRAN and Gaussian to create hopefully highly or lowly symmetrical structures. My program is almost successful! The (fast) last step is to place the hydrogens that…
Hi my dear friends! Now I am enrolled in a German B.1 course at Goethe Institut Singapur. My teacher Denny is a very kind and lovely guy~ I also have a lot of new friends to learn German together. 🙂 Here is my first writting…
Die Zahlen: a journey backward A few years ago I had a discussion with my classmates on how integers could be defined. Simple as the question seemed to be, we found it hard to give a satisfactory answer. The best definition we came up with…
In an English module that I take this semester we are required to write an essay on any controversial topic in science. The topic I proposed was ‘Is mathematics discovery or invention?’. Such an idle and philosophical question seems immediately radical in a world where…