David Ridout's Old Homepage

This is my attempt at a webpage. You might think that this is just a cynical exercise in procrastination that will help me avoid doing that which I am meant to. But you'd be wrong - at least partially. To punish you for these unfair thoughts, I have included a picture of me (working hard). For those of you who want more, other attractive pictures may be found here. No compensation will be given for any visual impairment incurred by looking them. Penny and David's Photos The rest of this page is official stuff, consisting of carefully worded lies about me and my studies, past and present. Not to be read unless absolutely necessary. If you feel the need to send me abuse personally, you can send it to me here, or at the: Department of Physics and Mathematical Physics, University of Adelaide, North Terrace, Adelaide, 5005. Room 108, Extension 33123.

My Studies

I graduated from Rossmoyne Senior High School in Perth, Western Australia, in 1993, and enrolled at Murdoch University in their chemistry programme. After much larking about, and a little hard work (of dubious quality), I eventually graduated with an honours degree in pure mathematics and theoretical physics, under the direction of Ken Harrison and Andris Stelbovics. This was 1998 I think. They taught me all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff about operators on Hilbert spaces and quantum scattering theory (respectively). You know, the sort of stuff everyone should know. I wouldn't read it myself, but you can gaze in disgust at my honours thesis here (Warning: 517K).

I then spent a few months working part time for Ken and Jo Ward doing some actual experiments (shocking!) to test some signals they had invented for optimal worst case system identification. Actually most of this was programming and pure mathematics, but at the end of the day, there were actual moving mechanical parts. After this I headed off interstate to the University of Adelaide in South Australia to take up a summer scholarship, with Peter Bouwknegt. I did a bit of work concerning the recent proofs of various number-theoretic identities (dilogarithm and q-identities to be specific) that have come from advances in physics. Despite having to survive Adelaide's terrible summer and the temptation of living in a new place and the new distractions that entails, I apparently managed to do enough work to get my name on a paper.

Feeling the need to bludge off the system for a while, I had applied to the University of Western Australia back home for a scholarship. Amazingly, they gave me one, so upon my return I enrolled in a Masters degree in applied mathematics under the direction of Kevin Judd and Alistair Mees. Here I learnt all about the amazing world that is chaos theory, and as everyone knows, chaos theory is cool! After playing around for some time with the pretty pictures that chaotic dynamicists love to make, I eventually started doing some real work on such wonderful things as cycle expansions and context trees. Finally I settled on the problem of non-linear noise reduction, and Kevin and I proved a couple of results which I think are damn fine. At the moment, it would appear that I'm in a minority (not for the first time either). Oh well, one day I shall triumph. Until then, my masters thesis can be viewed here (Warning: 438K).

So now I am studying for a PhD in Mathematical Physics in the Department of Physics and Mathematical Physics at Adelaide Uni, again under the supervision of Peter Bouwknegt. Here I can work on my lifelong ambition; to work out what physicists are talking about when they talk about all that cool stuff that they talk about. Specifically, I am currently studying some aspects of the geometry of Wess-Zumino-Witten models, as well as making a detailed investigation of fusion rings, in order to illuminate my ongoing study of charge groups of various D-branes in these models. If you'd like to see my thesis, it's here (Warning: 587K).