Hello everyone, I am putting out this blog post for the sole purpose of keeping myself accountable in the next 3 months to actually getting stuff done and accomplishing my goals for the summer. I want to outline the projects on which I will be working in a little bit of detail. This way, I can concretely measure my progress and evaluate how well I am working by setting benchmarks, and by looking at the duration and quality of my work.

Anyways, during the summer I am hoping to accomplish a few things. In the next two weeks (before I leave for the ISSYP summer program, which I will likely blog about) I want to have completed significant technical work on forest fire modelling. I’m hoping to have the even grid simulation paper complete and ready for review by experts in statistical mechanics/applied mathematics. This will involve reading Reif’s textbook on statistical mechanics, coding some simulations, and releasing the first stable version of the Inferno library. In addition to this, I’m hoping to make significant progress with my Griffiths/Munkres solution manuals, and start working on my newest idea: TorQ, a topological quantum computing simulator. More specifically, for the next few weeks, my goals will be as follows:

  • Finish writing research paper on even grid results and send to people for feedback
  • Read a large portion of Reif's statistical mechanics textbook
  • Finish review paper on statistical methods for forest fire simulation (also send to experts for feedback)
  • Write 15 quantum mechanics solutions
  • Write 15 topology solutions
  • Finish reading paper on topological quantum computing
  • Finish coding braidword-finding algorithm for TorQ


I will put out another post right before I head off to ISSYP talking about whether I actually accomplished my goals, and reflect on what I could have done differently. That’s all for now, time to get to work!