The National Earthquake Alerts Centre (NEAC) operates highly-available software systems that detect earthquakes and disseminate the resulting information. I am the lead developer on a small team responsible for maintaining and enhancing these systems, providing architectural guidance and fostering a culture of code review and continual improvement.
A fixed-term position at the High Resolution Plant Phenomics Centre developing software for agriculture and plant science. My main focus was developing infrastructure to exploit time series data gathered from sensor networks:
Most of this work was integrated into an existing web application built on a Linux+Apache+SQLite+PHP stack. I also contributed to other projects, including a REST microservice built in Java/Spring and deployed using Docker.
Teaching and marking for undergraduate classes in: Introduction to Mathematical Thinking, Advanced Mathematics and Applications, Black Holes and Cosmology.
Design and full-stack development of web applications & administration of associated systems and databases.
I worked on various large web applications, mostly built on Linux+Apache+Perl and backed by MySQL or PostgreSQL. On the frontend, I used JavaScript (JQuery, ExtJS) to create interactive user experiences.
Many of these applications were business systems that interfaced with older proprietary software; so I became proficient in systems integration, data wrangling/ETL and job scheduling.
PhD Thesis:
Geometric Flows of Diffeomorphisms.
Supervisor: Ben Andrews.
Geometric flows hijack what we know about the physics of
heat flow to study geometry: by making a mathematical analogy between "spikiness" and heat,
we can deform poorly-understood spiky objects to simple smooth ones; and by understanding the
mathematical properties of this deformation we can derive new knowledge about the spiky things we
started with. In my thesis research, I applied this methodology to a previously unstudied class of
flow.
Majors: Mathematics, Physics.
Honours Thesis:
The Riemannian Penrose Inequality and the Inverse Mean Curvature Flow.
Supervisor: Gilbert Weinstein.
The universe should weigh at least as much as the
biggest black hole it contains, but the mathematical embodiment of this fact (the Penrose Inequality)
is remarkably difficult to derive from general relativity: it took until 1999 for even a special case
to be proven. This thesis was an exposition of the problem and its solution intended for a slightly
less expert audience.
Reading project on the problem of minimal surfaces: if you dip a wonky loop of wire in a bucket of soapy water, what is the shape of the resulting bubble? The techniques developed to study this problem are now ubiquitous in physics and geometry.
Reading project in comparison geometry, the quantitative study of how the familiar relationships of lengths and angles change when we work on a curved surface (or in a curved space).
Numerical investigation of p-adic zeta functions using the mathematical programming language PARI/GP. Culminated in a presentation at the CSIRO Big Day In.