DSD

Posted in Code, Math, Physics, Projects
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Lie Group Computations With Python

lie is a python mod­ule for com­pu­ta­tions with Lie groups, Lie alge­bras, rep­re­sen­ta­tions, root sys­tems, and more.

It’s based on the com­puter alge­bra pack­age LiE, writ­ten by M. A. A. van Leeuwen, A. M. Cohen and B. Lisser in the early 90’s. They chose to imple­ment a pro­pri­etary script­ing lan­guage as a wrap­per for all the fancy math­e­mat­i­cal algo­rithms. While this lan­guage is use­ful for inter­ac­tive com­pu­ta­tions and short scripts, python is more expres­sive and pow­er­ful — def­i­nitely what you want when explor­ing your favorite excep­tional group.

A Fun Example

Here’s an exam­ple of using lie to do a cal­cu­la­tion that’s near and dear to every high energy theorist’s heart. We’ll show how the 10 + 5bar + 1 rep­re­sen­ta­tion of SU(5) con­tains a sin­gle stan­dard model gen­er­a­tion. First we’ll fire up python and import the lie mod­ule. Con­tinue reading…

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Radiology Art

bunnybean-med The NYTimes has an inter­est­ing arti­cle today about artist and med­ical stu­dent Satre Stuelke’s Radi­ol­ogy Art project. If you’re an artist with access to expen­sive med­ical equip­ment, what bet­ter to do than scan ran­dom stuff and see what happens?

Stuelke’s medium of choice is a CT Scan­ner, which takes a series of X-ray images of an object with dif­fer­ent focal lengths and from dif­fer­ent angles. The data can then be assem­bled into a 3D image of the object through a process called “tomosyn­the­sis.” This, in turn, allows you to dis­cern impor­tant facts. For instance, appar­ently, the bunny to the right is filled with beans.