User:DukeJuggler
My name is Aaron Sherman.
Phonetic Pronunciation
The phonetic pronunciation of my name looks like this: Air-in Sure-min.
About Me
I am an active member of Campus Crusade for Christ and the Duke Circus Club here at Duke. I have juggled for 4 years, unicycled for three, and have been a balloon twister for 2 years. One of the biggest things in my life is my faith and my desire to get to know Christ. I struggle often with school work and am not perfect, but I get along alright and have some amazing friends here at Duke.
Grand Challenges
When I saw we had to find an article about one of the grand challenges, and I saw the challenge summarized as "provide energy from fusion" my mind immediately jumped to a project that is still under construction known as General Fusion. They have what is apparently a whole new approach to nuclear fusion involving a number of huge pistons. Their website can be found here: General Fusion
And here is an article describing the project and their research:
A New Approach to Fusion, Tyler Hamilton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review, created 31 July 2009, accessed 23 September 2010 (Provide energy from fusion)
Favorite MATLAB Demo
My favorite MATLAB Demonstration was the Traveling Salesman problem. I recall trying to solve this problem, one of the few still unsolved math problems of our time, at a summer program two years back, though we were really using a guess and check method with a map and rulers rather than actual math. The problem was insanely complex and hard to wrap ones head around. My appreciation for MATLAB has grown ten-fold because of this demo; MATLAB's ability to solve this problem quickly and efficiently for any number of cities is amazing! It took me almost an hour to even figure out what looked like the best path, and it was no where near the shortest. Although the script file for the traveling salesman demo was intimidating, it is also in some way reassuring because I will hopefully never need MATLAB for something that difficult while I am in EGR53, and yet it also gives me a better taste for the types of difficult programming that can be accomplished via MATLAB.
