I love traveling. My experiences as a graduate student have fostered my love for traveling. Below you can see the Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I visited this location while participating in an International Research Experience for Students hosted by the Department of Mathematics at California State University, Northridge and the University of Sao Paolo, Sao Carlos.
The experience involved creating teams of US and Brazilian students working together on a project. I worked on Numerical Simulations of Potential Fluid Flow using the Finite Element Method. A copy of the manuscript our team (the FEM team) produced can be found here. The results were selected to be presented in the 26th International Mathematics Colloquium in IMPA, the Institute of Mathematics, Pure and Applied in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, pictured below.
When I returned to the US, I had the opportunity to share my team's finding at the NSF GK-12 Annual Poster Presentation in Washington D.C. Below is a picture of part of the FEM team from Brazil presenting the poster.
The picture below depicts one of the most peaceful places I have traveled to. I jokingly describe it as place where mathematicians may "rest in peace." This is the lagoon at IAS, the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.
As I mentioned above, I participated in the NSF GK-12 Program, called FERMAT, at Cal State Northridge, department of mathematics. Below is a picture of one of my first middle school Algebra classrooms.
One of the fun activities I got to do while participating in the FERMAT program was create fun math props. Below is a prototype for an "X-box." Inside the "X-box" we locked a secret. We posed the Alice-Bob postal analogy for delivering a secret through the mail and watched middle school students cleverly figure out how to use two locks and two keys to transport one message throught the "X-box." In case you are wondering, the secret was (is) math is fun.
I am now a fifth year Ph.D. student in the department of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I'm going to miss the views.
