Author Archives: John F. Lindner

A chill went through the spaceflight community last week as NASA reported that it had lost contact with the Ingenuity Mars helicopter. Delivered to Mars under the belly of the Perseverance rover and intended as a 5-flight 30-sol tech demo, … Cont… Continue reading →

Because of the pandemic, the summer of 2019 was regrettably and unexpectedly my last Wooster summer research program, but the team was amazing. Niklas Manz and I obtained Sherman-Fairchild funding to work with Margaret McGuire ’20, Yang (Fish) Yu… Continue reading →

I hired Kiyomi from Hawai’i for our NSF REU summer program in spring 2020 amidst fears of the pandemic that eventually postponed the program two years. When she finally arrived in summer 2022, I had already retired from Wooster, where … Con… Continue reading →

When I bought my new house, I knew I would soon need to replace its heat pump, which was almost 20 years old. Earlier this month, with my old pump laboring under a cold snap, I upgraded to a new … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I asked Siri to wake me at 7:15 AM this morning so I could watch SpaceX’s second Integrated Flight Test of Super Heavy Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. Unfortunately, my house suffered a rare power outage … Continu… Continue reading →

For the last two years, the Nonlinear Artificial Intelligence Lab and I have labored to incorporate diversity in machine learning. Diversity conveys advantages in nature, yet homogeneous neurons typically comprise the layers of artificial neural networ… Continue reading →

A particle confined to an impassable box is a paradigmatic and exactly solvable one-dimensional quantum system modeled by an infinite square well potential. NC State’s Elliott Holliday and Bill Ditto and I recently explored some of its infinitely… Continue reading →

When I was a kid, Saturn was the ringed planet. But today, we know that all of the outer planets have rings. The James Webb Space Telescope has now imaged each of them in infrared revealing their distinctive structures, including … Continue readi… Continue reading →

The motion of one of the simplest dynamical systems, a torqued, damped, nonlinear pendulum, can be infinitely complicated. Consider a simple pendulum of length [latex]l[/latex] and mass [latex]m[/latex] rigidly connected to an axle of radius [latex]r[/… Continue reading →

Just a couple of months after announcing the remarkable discovery of a single shape that forces a non periodic tiling of the plane, Smith, Myers, Kaplan, and Goodman-Strauss have announced an improved aperiodic monotile or ein stein. (Ein stein is &#82… Continue reading →