Will M. Farr

Department of Physics
MIT Room 37-624C
77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
(617) 324-2452
farr@mit.edu

I am a graduate student at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. I am presently working on my thesis, titled Numerical Relativity from a Gauge Theory Perspective. I maintain an infrequently-updated blog (which usually focuses on programming languages and coding---hobbies of mine) called Scheming.

Research Interests

Advanced Mechanical Integrators: Variational and symplectic integrators for mechanical systems, particularly N-body systems.
N-Body Methods: Application to medium-N (N ~ 10^3--6) self-gravitating systems and to cosmological simulations.
General Relativity: Particularly SO(3,1) gauge-theory formulations. I have posted some incomplete presentations dealing with this here.
Numerical Relativity: Merging advanced integrators and the SO(3,1) formulation of relativity.

Publications

arXiv:0905.1066. An Experiment in Using Virtual Worlds for Scientific Visualization of Self-Gravitating Systems. WMF, Piet Hut, Jeff Ames, and Adam Johnson. Submitted to Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.
arXiv:0810.1548. Variational Integrators for Almost-Integrable Systems. WMF. Celest. Mech. and Dyn. Astron., 103, 105--118 (2009). DOI: 10.1007/s10569-008-9172-3
arXiv:astro-ph/0611416. Variational Integrators for the Gravitational N-Body Problem. WMF and Edmund Bertschinger. ApJ, 663, 1420 (2007).
hep-ph/0205220. Detection of Supernova Neutrinos by Neutrino-Proton Elastic Scattering. John F. Beacom, WMF and Petr Vogel. Phys. Rev. D 66 (2002) 033001.

Code

I do a lot of programming (both in my job, and as a hobby). I am fluent in Scheme (particularly the distributions from PLT, Bigloo, and Chicken), OCaml, and C. I have passing familiarity with the Gambit-C scheme distribution, Common Lisp (particularly the SBCL distribution), SML (using SML/NJ), Haskell (using GHC), Fortran (both 77 and 90/95), C++, Java, and PHP. I have never programmed in a logic programming language like Prolog, or in any Forth-like language, though I probably should have tried these at one point or another.

I have previously posted some useful code at this site---here it is:

Code to duplicate some of the scmutils functionality in PLT Scheme and perform some useful computations with abstract groups.
Packages for OS X of older versions of Bigloo, back when I packaged them up as they came out.
Code to allow registering finalizers for non-GC-managed objects in Bigloo.
Code with bindings for the random number generation functions from the GSL for PLT Scheme.
Code to allow using the Mac OS X profiler, Shark to profile SBCL code.
Code for SRFI-11 for Bigloo.
Code for SRFI-32 for Bigloo.
Code for SRFI-78 for Bigloo.
Code for SRFI-43 for Bigloo.

PGP Key

If you want to get in touch with me, below is my PGP key (which is also available from the keyservers---its fingerprint is BE71 3BDE 6F24 FB7E 14C2 C642 D48A 196D 663E 746C).

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Last updated 8 May 2009 by Will M. Farr.