I rushed mine, to the extent that my supervisor mentioned it to me a few years later... it was a reflection of my state of mind at the time, exhausted and overwhelmed.. if I ever get around to doing another one I'll give it the attention and love it deserves

despite having a phd in nonlinear dynamics, I struggle to wrap my head around most of this stuff... but I always found is deeply fascinating.

In one system I studied we had a sequence of period doublings, which followed one of the feigenbaum constants[1]

seeing this happen in the lab, and subsequently seeing it numerically, and uncovering the analytics behind it was a worthy use of 6 years

--- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feigenbaum_constants

the extensibility of matplotlib is simply incredible to me. I've always found the main limiting factor to be my imagination, once I wrap my head around what I want a plot to look like I know matplotlib will facilitate it. An absolute marvel, and a credit to the devs

exact analytical solutions are nice as a check against any numerical solutions imo. (checking the same calculations in multiple ways is handy for error catching ime)

because it's really hard, and they need to publish :)

-- phd in physics

What, you don't want to be a 10th year grad student then post-doc till your mid-to-late 30's?

Also, to be honest, those problems are kind of boring.

:)

-- phd in physics.

I feel this

-- phd in physics

Having spent ~6 years studying nonlinear laser dynamics, it always amuses me to see bifurcation theory pop up on HN.

https://neuronaldynamics.epfl.ch/online/Ch4.S4.html

A fantastic resource on a lot of this material (basically a peer reviewed wikipedia): http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Bifurcation

doing the math is seldom enough ;)

*KE == kinetic energy

kinetic energy: "energy of an object is the energy that it possesses due to its motion. It is defined as the work needed to accelerate a body of a given mass from rest to its stated velocity. Having gained this energy during its acceleration, the body maintains this kinetic energy unless its speed changes."

in normal person terms: the energy of moving, or ~exercise, in a parallel world :)

anonymous messages are sometimes very powerful, measurements that are easy to make are not necessarily the right ones to make

sometimes you get snowed in, often you get snowed under

a spectacularly unbiased example, multiple measurements, experimental and simulated, of the same thing :)

http://imgur.com/a/m2GRZ