User:TKowalczyk

About Me

I am a freshman studying Mechanical engineering at Duke University. I'm also taking courses in the Doctors, Lawyers, and Scientists in Medieval and Renaissance Europe Focus in Duke's Trinity College.

Interests

I'm very interested in aerospace engineering and visual art (my favorite medium is oil pastel). I admire/am inspired by the work of Edgar Degas and Leonardo da Vinci. I also enjoy reading works of philosophy (especially Plato) and Classical and Medieval literature.

Grand Challenges for Engineering

The NAE's Grand Challenges for Engineering are incredibly expansive; this particular article on improving urban infrastructure by improving driver/vehicle interfacing caught my interest:

5 things your car will finally do in 2020, John Brandon, CNN, updated 12 March 2008, accessed 8 September 2015 (Restore and improve urban infrastructure)

The ways technology is being used to improve how we interact with our world absolutely amaze me.

Learning Matlab

As a part of learning to use Matlab, we've viewed a series of tutorials and demonstrations built into the program. My favorite demonstration was "Displaying Complex Three-Dimensional Objects" (it can be found here). Due to my training as a visual artist, I've always found images and models to be immensely helpful in generating solutions to design problems. The great range of 3-D objects which Matlab can model--from transparent wireframes to a fully-lit opaque forms--shows the incredible versatility of Matlab. The ability to have data, code, and the correct model together in one interface (as this demonstration shows) will likely be extremely helpful in analytic and solving engineering problems.