Aleksi Hartikainen @aleksi@qoto.org

@sjb yep. Their HW is good but SW is lagging NVIDIA (and even intel I think) severely. Amd needs to invest heavily into vulkan compute (or similar) to create a serious competitor for cuda. Right now Nvidia is able to charge more for similar hardware just because their SW stack is better.

#physics #quantummechanics #blog #julia
Wrote this blog post (first ever) about simple computational methods for simple quantum time evolution. Goal was to test some numerical methods and create some animations.

Nothing special, just something I had fun playing around with in Julia. Julia seems super well-designed for mathy code. Also, making animated plots was very easy.

https://blog.ahartik.com/posts/2023/tdse-numerical/

Over holiday break I was reading Shankar's QM book. I got through and really enjoyed the first chapter, which goes over required mathematical tools.

The second chapter goes over Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics, which was much harder to grasp. I find #physics almost requires some sort of lectures, whereas math can be learned from a book.

Luckily I found a lecture on YT by Prof.V.Balakrishnan on the topic of Lagrangian mech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCZ80l6UarM . Very clear, wholesome and insightful!

Towards the end of last year I wanted to do a hobby programming project and I had just finished my introduction to QM course. So to learn some rust+wasm I built a visualization for hydrogen orbitals:

https://ahartik.github.io/orbitals/

You can zoom using mouse wheel (or multitouch on mobile) and pan using mouse.

Let me know if you have ideas for improvements. I might write a blog post about this later, there are some clever tricks in the shader code.

#wasm #quantummechanics #physics #wgpu

@rednekulo
In the context of quantum mechanics (and physical reality, which seems to obey quantum mechanics) that may be indeed correct.

But there are many contexts where functions *are* evaluated at exact points, for example when evaluated by (non-quantum) computers or by people.

To me the most reasonable (concise, useful) definition of a function is still a mapping that can be evaluated at any point. So calling things like Delta function "generalized functions" seems appropriate.

@mircea

Thanks for the pointer to Schwartz distributions! Now that I've read and thought a bit more about it, seems like these distributions are "derivatives" of functions that are not necessarily differentiable. So they only "work" as functions when inside integrals.

For example Dirac's delta function is the derivative of the Heaviside step function. Heaviside function is not differentiable, since it's not continuous.

#math #quantummechanics
How do mathematicians feel about Dirac's delta function? Got any pointers to gaining a more precise, "mathy" understanding of it?

I've been reading Shankar's book on quantum mechanics (really like it). Dirac's delta function is something that has always bothered me somewhat, since it's not really a function.

Woah, I didn't expect such a warm welcome! Thanks, seems like I came to the right place!

The topic of "old internet" has made me think how common it is that "worse is better". Many people enjoy old cars, old computers, IRC, LP records or other old stuff, although more convenient and "better" items have been popularized. Maybe it has something to do with having control over one's experience.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to everyone!

#introductions #introduction

I never joined Twitter or really posted on Facebook. I'm somewhat of a private person, not wanting to expose myself to too much online. But Mastodon reminds me of "old internet" by being a bit clunky and complicated to use, which I hope selects for the people that I tend like.

I used to work as a software engineer in Silicon Valley, but moved back to Europe and wanted to do something different. Currently I'm studying physics and math, hoping to complete a master's degree by 2024.

I'm here looking for insightful or helpful interactions around topics
of #physics, #math and #programming. I'm also looking for a place to toot my horn a little about personal projects and things I've learned, since many of my interests are too esoteric for my real-life friends.