I am a undergraduate student at the University of Vermont
majoring in applied mathematics. From July 2007 to January 2008 I studied at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile (pictures here [broken]). I will be returning to Valparaíso in March 2010 to study transportation systems with Andrés Moreira and Eric Goles in association with the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, the Instituto de Sistemas Complejos Valparaíso, and the US Fulbright program.
Sometimes I play ultimate frisbee for Team Chill at UVM.
Chaotic convection: I am working with Chris Danforth, Darren Hitt, and El Hassan Ridouane to build and analyze a physical analog of the 1963 Lorenz system, the first example of deterministic chaos. It's called a thermosyphon and is a type of non-mechanical heat pump or convection loop. We use a combination of data assimilation and ensemble forecasting methods to predict the occurance of flow reversals we call regime chnages. I've uploaded a cool video that shows one measure of the system's stability on the attractor. This is a recent presentation outlining our research given at the UVM Student Research Conference. Read my thesis, if you dare.
Leaf vascular networks: Also known as venation patterns, a number of mathematical models have been proposed to explain the branching structures of leaves. Qinglan Xia proposed a model in 2007 which grows each leaf while simultaneously minimizing a cost function. This approach produces both the vascular network and boundary of the leaf. Varying the parameters of the model can produce many of the shapes observed in nature, including that of the maple leaf (left). I began this as a project in two of Peter Dodds' classes.
Happiness of online interactions: Here we look at a basic measure of the happiness in large-scale texts. A psychological study called "Associative Norms for English Words" (ANEW) asked a number of adults to assign a happiness value or "valence" between 1 and 9 to 1035 common words. When looking at a large sample of text, the average valence of the ANEW words contained therein can give a rough measure of the text's emotional content. This was recently published in a paper by Danforth and Dodds in the Journal of Happiness Studies. Along with fellow students Michael Pellon, Matt Tretin, and Isabelle Kloumann, we are expanding this study to the social networking site Twitter. I have been involved with launching One Happy Bird (coming soon), a website that will allow users to interact with this data.
Brent Harrewyn Photography - 1 2 3
Honors College Newsletter June/May 2009
UVM prof works to aid hurricane forecasts - the Burlington Free Press talks about our thermosyphon project
Vermont's Non-Timber Forest Products - a website I made with Claire McKown for ethnobotany class, HCOL 195
Assorted things I've written
My parents also have sites: Dad, Mom (I maintain this)
Current address:
258 North Ave.My permanent address:
16 Orchard Ln.You can write me email at two addresses, school-related and personal
If you'd like an email to be private and secure, please use my GPG public key
