Posts

Some Figures From My PhD

Jul 25, 2024 art mathematics

Here is a small assortment of figures that I made during my PhD with the TWIST and INSPIRE groups, mainly for my thesis. I started to learn Blender shortly after the start of my PhD, but I ended up switching to POV-Ray, which is the tool used to create most of the images on this page (the only exception being the H-shaped skyrmion render, for which I used Blender). Although POV-Ray is significantly older and has fewer features than Blender, I have found it to be much more simple to use where more complex mathematics is required to describe an object (with Blender, I always felt like I was having to “hack” it in order to create what I wanted, even with the Python API).

AI Can Generate Pretty Good Music Now

Jul 23, 2024 AI art

It seems like ChatGPT has been around forever now, and despite only having used it for a year or so, many people wonder how they ever lived without it. I recently discovered that a similar service exists for audio, where songs can be generated from a prompt. One example of such a service is Udio. At the time of writing, it is free to use, albeit with a limited (but generous) number of credits.

I Got My PhD!

May 14, 2024 education life

After years of work, my PhD journal has finally come to an end! I defended my thesis “Creation and Manipulation of Topological Magnetic Textures in Chiral and Frustrated Magnets” at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz on 14th May 2024, with the grade 1.0 (“very good”).

Read my thesis here.

USA 2022

Sep 4, 2022 travel

Between June and August 2022, I had the wonderful opportunity to visit Ran Cheng’s group at the University of California, Riverside, to work on a (still ongoing, at time of writing) project. This post, however, is about the exciting things I got up to when I was not working!

Rather than flying directly to Los Angeles, I decided that I would book my flight to Seattle, a city that I had been wanting to visit for a good decade. I would then take the Amtrak down to Portland, another city I’d been dreaming of going to for a good while, and then further onwards to Los Angeles and Riverside. I flew with Condor, and the flight was a pretty nice experience. On the way, I got a nice view of Mainz, the city I called home for the first year and a half of my PhD.

Photography

Jun 2, 2022 photography travel

As a teenager, I was quite into photography, especially after my parents got me a Canon EOS 600D for Christmas when I was 15. Although I don’t really do so much of this at the moment, here is a collection of photos that I have taken in various places around the world.

Setting up Inverse Search with Neovim, VimTeX and Zathura

Dec 5, 2021 vim latex zathura

Note 06.01.2023: With the release of VimTex 2.8, you probably don’t need to do this any more. See :help vimtex-synctex-inverse-search.

There are many reasons to write LaTeX in Vim instead of the more “traditional” LaTeX editors. Maybe you want to type long equations quickly with the help of UltiSnips, or you just want to make the most of Vim’s many features. VimTeX is a plugin for Vim (and Neovim) which allows for the easy authoring of LaTeX files using Vim, with useful features such as autocompilation, and Zathura is a minimalist, highly customisable document viewer with Vim keybindings by default.

Coffee Cup to Doughnut Animation

Aug 1, 2020 mathematics art

I made this animation using Blender when writing my project proposal for my Studienstiftung application.