Posts and more
On this page, all blog posts, presentations and other updates are listed.
Have fun!
Posts
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This Month's Read IV: Ghosts, jets and other shenigans (Ongoing)
“This month’s read” will cover some interesting, but fascinating concepts in field theory and the calculus of variations. Most physicists have encountered the notion of (Faddeev–Popov) ‘ghost’ at some point or another in there carreer and might have thought “What in the world is this? Do we really need this?” On the other hand, science aficionados might have encountered that same term in (popular) science news, where it is often depicted as some mysterious and magical thing. This post aims to clear up some of the mystery and explain why these objects are ‘necessary’ for a rigorous mathematical treatment of the subject.
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This Month's Read III: Electric-magnetic duality
The previous “This month’s read” posts were about probability theory and (quantum) logic. This month’s post will cover something completely different: electromagnetism (and some generalizations). Although we have experimentally discovered only electric charges (magnetic fields are generated by moving or ‘spinning’ electric charges), the laws of electromagnetism exhibit a variety of beautiful symmetries and duality relations when we introduce magnetic charges as well!
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This Month's Read II: Quantum logic (Ongoing)
Last month’s post was about probability theory. This month’s post will cover something completely different. Most people have heard about quantum mechanics and its implications for technology (in the form of quantum computing). What is less well known is the logical structure of the propositions that can be considered in quantum mechanics. ‘Quantum logic’, which is the type of logic that should come out of this consideration, has been studied since the days that quantum mechanics was formalized. However, pay attention to the word ‘should’ in the previous sentence. It turns out that the naive logic that one would extract is actually quite ill behaved.
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This Month's Read I: Abstract Wiener Spaces
One of the most influential websites for me was John Baez’s This Week’s Finds. I learned many things from these blog posts and it helped me realize which scientific or mathematical topics interested me most. Lately, I have been spending quite some time studying several topics, usually a few weeks each, and it occurred to me that it might be fun and interesting to write about them (even though everything hasn’t been worked out yet).
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Frieze patterns, quantum information theory and group cohomology (Ongoing)
In 2019, I successfully defended my Master’s thesis on matrix product states and symmetry-protected phases topological phases (see here). Now, almost 5 years later, I think it is the perfect time to write down a (short) introduction and overview of what I did during my thesis and how it relates to various fields of science.
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Prediction Intervals
This post is based on my first paper published earlier this year: “Valid prediction intervals for regression problems” in collaboration with my promotors Willem Waegeman and Bernard De Baets.
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Appendix: Measure Theory
Although we often do not really care about the formalities of a framework in practice, from a theoretical point of view it is important to carefully treat all objects. For this reason, this appendix will (briefly) cover the main notions and results that will be used throughout the posts on probability theory and related subjects.
Talks and presentations
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Public PhD Defense
This post contains the content of my PhD defense, together with some extra information and (personal) ideas for further work.
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Cournot and the frequentist's secret (Ongoing)
This post contains the content of a talk, titled “Cournot and the frequentist’s secret”, that I gave for the Statistics Discussion Group at the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering (UGent). This topic arose in a very natural way during my research on conformal prediction, since two of the most influential researchers in the field of conformal prediction are the very same people that have written most of the recent papers on Cournot’s principle (Vladimir Vovk and Glenn Shafer).
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A new language for science and philosophy (Ongoing)
This post contains the content of a talk, titled “A new language for science and philosophy”, that I gave for the Science Cafe at the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering (UGent). This talk was born after reading the book “Modal homotopy type theory: The prospect of a new logic for philosophy” by David Corfield and, although most people in the audience might have felt like they got struck by hammer (a lot of information in an arguably too short time frame), I had a lot of fun preparing and giving it.
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Pictorial Bayes
This post contains the content of a talk, titled “Drawing pictures with Nico”, that I gave for the Statistics Discussion Group at the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering (UGent). I have reworked parts of the talk and elaborated on many concepts. Moreover, I have added an ‘optional’ part at the end which puts everything within a much more abstract setting.
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Normalizing flows for regression problems
This talk, given as part of the Machine Learning Discussion Group of KERMIT, had three goals:
- Giving an introduction to the formal (measure-theoretic) foundations of probability theory.
- Explaining how to transform an arbitrary distribution into a normal distribution.
- Applying the normalizing flow framework to regression problems.
Trivia
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Climbing in Fontainebleau
As tradition requires, we went bouldering in the woods of Fontainebleau. This time, our group counted over ten people!
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Olympic Games: Paris 2024
In 2024, the Olympic Games took place in Paris, so we had to be there. To nobody’s surprise, we went to see the boulder and lead climbing competition. Since we were in the vicinity anyway, we also went for a outdoor boulder session in Fontainebleau.
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Holidays in Cyprus
A selection of pictures from the trip to Cyprus in May, 2024 with my girlfriend.
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Trip to Jordan
In September 2019, I went on tour through Jordan together with my good friend Julian. We started off in the busy capital of Amman and ended our journey with a nice resort in Aqaba. Along the way we visited various fascinating places such as Jerash, Al-Karak, Shobak and, Petra.
Upcoming posts
- This Month's Read IV: Fermat's Last Theorem (Post)
- Constrained systems and Gauge theory (Post)
- Climbing in Fontainebleau (Trivia)
- Summer school ACDL (Trivia)
Index
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