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For Teague
Sadly and unexpectedly Wooster physics senior Teague Curless ’22 died yesterday. I was fortunate to teach Teague some physics, especially in my Nonlinear Dynamics class last spring. Teague’s semester project beautifully illustrated chaos in a double pendulum — a pendulum swinging from another pendulum, like The Swinging Sticks® kinetic sculpture that silently rotates and librates beside me as I write. Using Mathematica, Teague numerically integrated the relevant Lagrange equations to…
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Silver medal in the 2020 University Physics Competition
Wooster team earns a silver medal in the 2020 University Physics Competition
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Physics helps cure “chaos blindness”
Teaching physics to neural networks removes ‘chaos blindness’ Researchers from North Carolina State University have discovered that teaching physics to neural networks enables those networks to better adapt to chaos within their environment. The work has implications for improved artificial intelligence (AI) applications ranging from medical diagnostics to automated drone piloting. Neural networks are an…
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Solar System Model
The scale of Wooster’s planet walk is approximately five billion to one. Disks engraved on 3.5-inch brass markers embedded along the west sidewalk of Beall Avenue through campus represent the planets (and circles represent planetary rings). The four terrestrial planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars are near the sun between Pearl and Stibbs Streets. Of the…
