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On my last day in Newcastle, Australia, James and me explored Newcastle's Blackbutt Reserve. This park is perfect for anyone enjoying long walks and features for instance a rain forest area as well as (enclosed) kangaroos, koalas (which are amazing in their sleepy attitude), emus and lots of bird like animals. Most intrigued I was, however, by the thousands of (free) bats that were hanging on trees like fruits; except they were smelling like a zoo and making some pretty good noise. James informed me that these are flying foxes.

While visiting the University of Newcastle in Australia I was able to take a weekend off and go and take a look at Sydney. Which is fantastic! The mix of a big city with a characteristic skyline and spacious, beautiful parks, tourist beaches and gorgeous cliffs within the reach of an enjoyable half an hour ferry ride, and attractions such as the Sydney Opera House or the Sydney Harbour Bridge (which you can walk on for a great view over the city) is just astounding. Fortunately, I had Rongmin Lu as my companion and personal tour guide. read more »

On August 18, 2009, the University of Newcastle hosted a CARMA workshop on Multidimensional Numerical Integration and Special Function Evaluation. Besides enjoying very interesting talks it's been my pleasure to present, together with James Wan, on progress of our joint work with Jon Borwein, Peter Donovan and Dirk Nuyens on expectations of random walks.

Attachment: 

randomwalkintegrals.pdf

This summer is really exciting! Currently, I'm visiting the University of Newcastle in Australia (about 100miles north of Sydney). Not only is the project I'm working on with Jon Borwein highly interesting but I also have the opportunity to explore a little bit of Australia. Particularly gorgeous scenery that I was allowed to witness includes a park which used to be a brick pit as well as Newcastle's coast-line. Here are some pictures.

From June 1-26, 2009, I had the great pleasure to visit Marc Chamberland at Grinnell College, Iowa. Here are some pictures illustrating this enjoyable time filled with lots of experimental math and introductions to unrelated fun like frisbee golf.

Thank you, Marc!

Today, I have been playing a little bit with Apollonian circle packings. Here is the code I wrote in Mathematica to visualize such packings (see below for an example).

Attachment: 

apolloniancirclepackings.nb

Recently, I have been doing experiments involving q-binomial coefficients in Mathematica. Starting with version 7, Mathematica is prepared for some q-business; in particular, there exists a function named QBinomial giving the q-analog of Binomial. However, this implementation turned out to not be fast enough for my needs. Here is an alternative approach which is not only way faster but provides a full factorization. read more »

The Tulane Mathematics Department as of April 27, 2009. Unfortunately but naturally, a few people are missing.

The following graph is dedicated to my brother Benjamin.

 read more »