About this blog
My dear reader, welcome to this site.
My name is Dmitry Podolsky, I am a professional theoretical physicist currently working at the Helsinki Institute of Physics, the University of Helsinki, Finland. My main interests are related to (but not limited to) general relativity and cosmology, turbulence, quantum field theory and string theory, dynamical chaos - everything related to physics and mathematics of systems far from equilibrium.
This blog is mostly about different mathematical methods developed to treat dynamical systems in extreme regimes (such as strong coupling). As it turns out, these methods can often be useful for the description of various phenomena in evolutionary biology, markets and sociology allowing me to consider my posts as interesting for general public (though sufficiently intelligent ;-), but that is who you are, my dear reader, because you did not click on this page by accident, did you?)
I also consider this blog as my scientific diary, and some posts (about one per week) will be devoted to the discussion of problems I am currently working on.
Finally, the third class of posts will include the discussion of open problems in physics, mathematics and biology, problems that essentially define what is cutting edge of science today. Genrich Altshuller, developer of the theory of inventive problem solving (aka TRIZ), once made a statement that all inventive problems can be classified according to their intrinsic complexity. Let me follow his logic and introduce a classification of all scientific problems :-) Namely, I claim that they can be divided into 4 categories:
- to solve a problem from the first category completely, you need to search the body of literature well, because it is probably already solved somewhere;
- the second category - you need to apply some well known method from a well developed branch of science to solve the problem;
- the third category - one has to develop a new method in a well developed branch of science, and, finally,
- to solve a problem belonging to the 4th category in my listing, on has to develop a new brunch of science (in particular because most probably your problem is interdisciplinary).
Discussing open scientific problems, I will be mostly focused on the known problems from 3rd and 4th category according to this classification. Also, I invite you to post an open problem you are aware of to this blog through the form on this page.
I have introduced quite a nontrivial structure for this blog. Any post will belong to a Readability category (Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, Master Mason and Master Postdoc). No special knowledge or education is prerequisite for “Entered Apprentice” posts; “Fellow Craft” posts will be probably hard to understand unless you possess a college-level knowledge of the topic I am talking about; “Master Mason” means a PhD level, while “Master Postdoc” posts will probably seem interesting only for specialists in the field.
Also, any post will belong to a particular “topic” category such as cosmology, neuroscience, molecular biology and genetics, etc. You can find the list of “topic” categories on the right side of the front page.
If you would like to contact me, please find the list of possible contact channels here.
With best regards,
Dmitry.
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