Miscellaneous

Past projects or activities I’ve done outside, or only tangentially related to, research and work – for coursework, fun, or both.

Visualizing complex functions of several dimensions

This was a fun project I did for the Visualization course taught by Prof. Victoria Interrante in the computer science department at the U of MN. The idea was to explore a function of several dimensions by looking at several slices of it simultaneously. It was first proposed as “HyperSlice” in a 1993 paper by van Wijk and van Liere; the idea is similar to the scatterplot matrices popular in statistics, but for continuous functions rather than sets of data. I implemented HyperSlice in Processing and extended it to complex-valued functions with hue coding. I’ll post the code as soon as I can confirm it still works! Now that I think about it, it wouldn’t be too hard to re-implement this in Matplotlib…

Here’s my presentation and report with more detail on the project.

Old blog

In my second year of undergraduate study (2011-2012) I did an exchange programme at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, to get a better perspective on life and study in the country that had once been my home. I wrote a blog about the experience, which is still (as of this writing) available at zweite-heimat.blogspot.com.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to finish it because the pressures of studying and exams in a completely different academic system – and in a different language – took over (hey, wouldn’t that make a good blog post?). The older posts are wordy, sure, and it was as much an exercise in writing in German as it was to provide useful advice for others. On the other hand, it’s still fun for me to go back and see how my opinions and perceptions have changed since then.