The first flashback is to this morning. We woke up realizing we would never sleep in such hard beds again for a very long time. Then the checkout ritual starts, but after a short time everyone was ready to explore the city one last time. Some took the chance to visit an area of Stockholm they missed the past days, others visited some areas one more time to view them in daylight. I went to the Royal Palace, where at 12:15 the royal guarded turned shifts in a very traditional way. This happened in a traditional way where the new guard entered the palace on horses, leaded by the military fanfare. After saying a few pledges, the old guard took the horses and walked them to their stables. Some of the new guards then marched through the city to various guard posts, relieving the old guard standing there.

But eventually we had to leave Stockholm. We flew with KLM, so checking in and changing seats to your preferences went very flexible and we were two hours to early at the gate. At the luggage claim in Schiphol it was so nice that all the participants went to everyone of the committee thanking them for the whole trip. Guys, you made my day.

Since I was then too tired to thank you all back, I will do it now. At first I’ll start with the participants that were the most close to us, namely the board of De Leidsche Flesch. They put much effort in a study trip which is most of the times not recognized. Thank you Vera for always giving up time to make the payments for the train, metro and bus tickets, passage fees, more tickets, more fees etcetera. Thank you the board for always thinking with us, giving advice when we asked for it, giving advice when we didn’t ask for it but at hindsight really needed, giving us suggestions and contacts, helping us with searching for companies to visit, etcetera. Without your help and advice the construction of the program would have started much slower and the program would be much thinner.

Now I will think all our fundings, namely the Universiteit Leiden, LUF, NNV and EPS, for making this whole trip possible for the students. During this trip I realized how much value a study trip has in connecting students with research, education and external contacts. This study trip may have opened the doors for some to study abroad in Sweden and Denmark. This study trip piqued the interest of students about research areas which the student did not know existed. Without your help this trip would for many of us be too expensive to participate and they would have missed some wonderful opportunities.

Parents, brothers, sisters, other relatives of our participants, colleagues and everyone else who I may have missed, thank you for reading the blogs and saying to your relatives here that you like them. Everyone underestimates the amount of work in such a post; an average post took 1.5 hours to construct. As you may have noticed our days are planned full, so most of our sleep has been lost to making these posts. Therefore your liking to the blog stimulated us in keeping it updated. I can say we truly enjoyed every minute of writing, no matter the time, and this blog turned out to be a beautiful description of the study trip and to an everlasting memory of this wonderful week.

A big thank you must go the our teachers in Leiden and our lecturers at the study trip. Without the teachers, the construction of the program would have been much slower, as almost every lecture of my program, apart for one, was only found through a connection with the teachers on Leiden. One must also notice that the speakers spend their free time for giving our students a lecture. They are voluntarily giving these lecture, so thank you for making time for us. We enjoyed listening to you. A special thank you must be made to the lecturers of Thursday and Friday, as on Thursday and Friday there was a holiday so these speakers spend their free day for their speech.

Participants, you were awesome. Your enthusiasm kept the committee standing and motivated to do more for you when we could. Also thank you to the participants that were really helpful to the committee when they noticed that the committee were in a pickle. The positive feedback from all of you on the program made the organization much more rewarding and I can really say that the week was much less fun without it. Please, I advice you, be as enthusiastic and motivated as you were last week on further study trips, weekends or other activities organized fully by volunteers. Keep up the good work. When I was tired and did not have the motivation to work further on the program, your smiles cheered me up and got me working again to make this week more exciting for you. I think I can say the last sentence on behalf of the whole committee.

Speaking of the committee, my last and biggest thank you must go to you. Every Tuesday from 13:00 to 13:45, the meetings at Esmee, our weekend, our trip to the Efteling, I had so much fun time with you. The hours we all put in our study trip are staggering, where Esmee and I made about 4 hours a week on average for 11 months and I think the rest of the committee just as much. Since you are all so wonderful, I will conclude this blog with a special thanks to each of you.

Paul, you tried many times to discipline me. Thank you for trying, but also thank you for keeping the whole committee together, for hosting every meeting, for knowing every detail of the trip and for knowing what everyone of us was doing. Your directness and typical sense of humor always lighted me up. You always took your time when one of us was in trouble and when someone asked for advice. Thank you for keeping overview, as I lost it on my work already after a very short time.

Alex, thank you for keeping my small breaks entertaining. You documented everything of our meetings in a creative fashion, making your documentations attractive to read. We were only kicked out of the communication channels twice as some chairmen do not understand our humor. I did not know you before the trip, but I am so glad you decided to apply for this committee. I am looking forward to what the rest of our student time has to bring us.

Brenda, thank you for always opening your honest mouth. You were an amazing treasurer who always could find a way to financially support our wild ideas. You worked really hard to control the money flows on the study trip and I can say from experience that this is a very hard task. Therefore you can be proud that all the spendings went between margins. You did a good job.

Esmee, I can say I collaborated with you the most. All those decisions that we had to make during the program construction, namely with part goes where, how long the breaks must be, joined or split program, which day do we travel from Copenhagen to Stockholm, first Copenhagen or first Stockholm, which group of students to write to, we did them together and you were always open for discussion. Also the small competitions like who is the first to fill their program and who is the first to find a company kept me motivating to always try even harder. Many do not know how much influence you had on the computer science and mathematics program and without your help the program would not have gone as smooth as it did now.

Kevin, without you we all would have been lost. You were responsible for the hotels, the public transport, the maps, all the routes from A to B, the flight and more. Without you we would have walked to our destination and slept on the streets. The evenings before the study trip you walked all the routes by yourself on Google Street View, which shows how dedicated you were to your task.

Last but not least, Sarah. You knew and cared about every participant as if he or she was your own child. During this trip every detail about every participant was always in an arms reach from you, so if something would have happened you could directly tell all the details to provide the appropriate help. Furthermore, in discussions you always thought about cases we did not consider or rendered insignificant, but in retrospective turned out to be quite relevant. You also were not shy to directly tell someone if you disagree with him, which sometimes strangles strangled a terrible idea at birth.

The quote of the day is the next lines I heard from the participants at Schiphol:

{{Insert commissioner}}, you can be very proud of yourself after organizing such a fun and smooth week. We enjoyed every minute of it. Thank you for this study trip.

Mathijs Kolkhuis Tanke signing off.

First of all, thank you too all the participants of the studytrip. Everybody has shown perfect behaviour, following Kevin and Paul around the city in what we lovingly refer to as ‘Sheep mode’. Also, we’ve never missed a train or a participant. You all have been a great audience to all our speakers and perhaps most important of all, you were a fun group!

Next, I’d like to thank Onno van Gaans and Peter Denteneer for accomponying us on our study trip. They spent a lot of time with the students and actively participated with the program. They were a great addition to the group and helped us out when even the most hardened students of us didn’t understand what was going on anymore. So from all of us, thank you!

Finally, I’d like to thank my fellow members of the committee that made all of this possible. We’ve had a great lot of fun together, and there are still many more fun times to come. As, even though the main event is over, there is still more work to be done.

All in all, I really wanted to come up with a silly joke about our chairman, I had already called it the Paul exclusion principle, after a famous Quantum Mechanical principle. But I’m to tired to come up with anything good. I guess, you can either have a great trip, or a great joke, but you can’t have both at the same time. (Get it, Pa dum Tssja)

I hope everybody enjoyed themselves, and I hope you enjoyed reading the blogs as they came by.

Cheers,

Alex

We started our day with a visit to the Vasa museum. The Vasa is a huge ship built between 1626 and 1628. However, due to construction and mathematical errors the ship was not wide enough and there was not enough ballast. Therefore, when it first hit the water, it sailed for 600 meters and then sank. Fifty people drowned and the ship remained at the bottom of the sea for years. Over time, people wanted to restore the ship, but the technology was not developed enough to retrieve the ship. In the 1950’s and later, technology was finally developed enough and after a few decades the whole ship could be extracted from the sea bottom. The whole ship is now viewable with various exhibitions about life on the ship, ship battles, ship building simulations, and more around the ship. It was quite impressive to see the rich detail in the woodwork of the ship, only to know that it sank in a few minutes. You could crouch in a replica of the hull, which is very low (indicating the rate of growth of Europeans over the years), and view the ship from the keel to the crows nest. It is really worth it to visit the ship while you are in Stockholm, since it is one of the most preserved artifacts from Swedish history.

In the afternoon we went to the mathematical faculty of Stockholm University. The lectures were situated in a beautiful lecture hall. Our first lecturer was Mia Deijfen, a university lecturer at Stockholm University. Her lecture was about mathematics on large networks. Examples of large networks are the world wide web, social networks and chains of sexual intercourse. The last network was the leading example of the next lecture. She first started with defining the properties of a large network. A typical property of a large network is the so-called ‘short distances’. It is most famous in a social network where it is claimed that two random persons are just six degrees away from each other. While that is not exactly true, it demonstrates that a network of over a billion people have very short distances. Another property is clustering. For example if X and Y are friends with Z, it is highly likely that X and Y are friends. Following this, Mia Deijfen demonstrated three models, starting with the simple Erdös-Renyi graph. She then continued with the configuration model, which also did not really show a large network. The last network was about preferential attachments, which was the best simple approximation to a large network.

Then the Dutch Pieter Trapman continued with a lecture about epidemics on large networks. He introduced a widely used model to describe epidemics called the SIR-model. In that model everyone in the population is susceptible to disease. When a sick person interacts with a susceptible person, that susceptible person gets sick immediately. The sick people get cured over time, after which they are called recovered. With cured we mean either dead or really cured; in mathematics those are the same. A disease like the flu could be modeled, but interacting with a person that has the flu does not always lead to the flu. However, HIV and chlamydia are excellent diseases to model, since an interaction between a susceptible and infected person is easily defined and contact almost always leads to sickness. Pieter Trapman showed the following picture of a graph detailing all the intercourses in an American High School in a year.

In this network the spread of HIV and chlamydia can be analyzed. One thing is rather interesting: HIV is in Africa a real problem, and in Europe less so, but the opposite is true for chlamydia. The diseases spread in exactly the same way, so it is a mystery to mathematicians why those diseases prefer those specific regions.

The last lecture of the whole study trip was held by Mathias Lindholm about the mathematics of insurances. There are two types of insurances, namely life insurance and non-life insurance. A special case of non-life insurance is insurance for chronic diseases and permanent handicaps. Many questions arise, such as: what is the likelihood that certain events happen, and the most important question: how would you set the price to transfer risk for certain time? There is no single answer to the last question. Other needs for insurances are calculating resources and making re-insurances. Then Mathias elaborated about the types of insurances, how they model such insurances and how the costs of insurances can be calculated.

In the evening we went to our final dinner at Il Forno Italiano. Kevin and I found this restaurant in Gamla Stan, the old city of Stockholm. Our dinner took place in our own room in the restaurant. The menu was outright delicious. We had a three course dinner and we were so lucky that this restaurant was so forthcoming in organizing this dinner. Without them, such a dinner could not be organized as restaurants in Sweden are so expensive for foreign guests. We could choose dishes from carpaccio and gamberi to a huge chunk of calf beef and pasta with ox-filet. Our chairman Paul first gave a speech honoring everyone of the committee. After the main course the president of the association, Tineke, gave a nice thank-you speech to the committee. After her speech we all sang the song of De Leidsche Flesch, which is a tradition at study trips. Last but not least, Larissa thanked everyone of the committee with a personal mug. After this wonderful night we went to explore Stockholm, since as the organizing committee there wasn’t much time to explore the city.

Thus at 2:40 we think we conclude this blog with our quotes of the day:

Esmee, we Stoopen ermee.

Wanneer Tineke klaar was met haar speech: “Tineke, we willen Nog a rede!”

Signed by Mathijs Kolkhuis Tanke & Kevin Oost

After a short trip by train we arrived in Uppsala. It is quite the pretty little town, with a lot of student live, except for today as ascension Day is a public holiday in Sweden

Uppsala university is the oldest university of scandinavia as it was founded in 1477.

The first lecture of the day was given by a Former member of the Leidsche Flesch, Ilke Engelhardt.
She talked about the Cassini & Rosetta missions, and used the most adorable ways possible to present her subject, including a plastic ducky to represent the comet 67P/Tsjoerjoemov-Gerasimenko. And apparently this comparison isn’t unique to Ilka, as her entire research devision lovinly refer to the Northern and Southerm Hemiduck when talking about different regions of the comet. We concluded the lecture with a sweet fairytale story about Rosetta and Philea, you can view it here online

Next, as appears to be scandinavian tradition, the fire alarm went off in the building. And, once again, as is fitting to true scientists, we casually ignored all safety protocols. But don’t worry, nobody got hurt, except perhaps our lunchtime break.

After the lunchbreak, which we spent sitting in the grass enjoying the lovely sun, we had a special moment. The Mathematicians and Computer scientists joined our group for 2 joint lectures.

Professor Andreas Korn was particularly sad that all his colleagues weren’t able to find any time to give a lecture when they found out today was a public holiday. It was a nice talk for the entire audience. He talked about our galaxy and the universe. In particular he talked about the GAIA mission and how it will change our entire understanding of the galaxy and possible the universe.

Then we concluded the day with a very cool lecture that had gotten the great alternative title: ‘Space keeps trying to kill us’. Some paleontologists have discovered a periodicity in large extinction events on earth, on a timescale of 26 million years. periodicities on such a timescale are typically only possible for astronomical phenomena, and our lecturer gave us some possible explanations for what could be going on. He was a very funny guy, and since he didn’t like powerpoints he had made illustrations for every slide which he showed on the screen.

After this we had a BBQ with the local students of Uppsala, enjoying hamburgers and drinks in the sun. Mathijs and Kevin wrote a more extensive discreption of this in their Blog

Quotes of the day:

On the subject of the mass extinction events: “They already got the dinosaurs, and I’m really pissed about that!”

“Don’t forget to bring your rice-jersey tomorrow for the group picture.” (Instead of Reis)

Cheers,
Alex

At 8:11 the train to Uppsala left Stockholm Central Station. Everyone was waking up with the beautiful views of the woods of Sweden. They work very therapeutic. After a while we arrived in Uppsala and then we could start our first lecture.

The first lecture was held by Maciej Klimek, a professor at Uppsala University in the Financial Mathematics department. The lecture was an introduction to financial mathematics and was split into two parts. The first part was contextual and was more like a history lesson, the second part went a bit in depth. He first introduced the start of financial mathematics, namely in the early era of Mesopotamia. There were clay tables found with scratches indicating loans, contracts and debts, which were neglected since the archeologists did not understand mathematics. This went on for ages until the financial world with call options and stock as we know now. It is noticeable that in cases of financial collapse the politicians always blame to the scientists. The only way that changed between Mesopotamia and now is the culture in which the blaming happens.
Then he discussed some tools used in financial mathematics, including the controversial ones like short selling and value at risk. His conclusions were the following: if one wants to excessively control the financial system, it nearly always leads to disaster. In the right hands, financial mathematics are a beautiful tool that will lead to great human advancement, but in the wrong hands financial mathematics will destroy our society. The most important take-home message was that financial mathematicians do not always know economics and economists do not understand mathematics. Thus if you read an article with someones opinion on the economy, be very critical.

The professor Takis Konstantopoulos (link to his blog) gave our second lecture about discrete stochastic processes with a focus on 1- and 2-dimensional random walks and Brownian motions. Imagine a person that is extremely drunk and stays drunk forever. Every minute there is 50% chance to take a step forward and 50% chance to take a step backward. Will the person always get back to his starting point? The answer, after a few surprisingly insightful computations, turned out to be yes. In particular, if the drunk person walks on for forever, he will visit his starting point infinitely many times.
The next case was a drunk person in Manhattan. At every crossing, there is a 25% chance to move in any direction. If your husband leaves his home in Manhattan drunk, will he ever come back? The computations were not much different from the previous case, so the conclusion was that you not have to worry, your husband will come back. It can still take a very long time, but if he leaves your home infinitely many times, he will all the times come back. Imagine you want be drunk in space. We calculated that this would be incredibly stupid as it is highly likely you will never get back to your space station if you fly away in the wrong direction.
He concluded the lecture with Brownian motion. Place a pencil on a sheet of paper and randomly scratch in any direction you like in this way. The result is every continuous but you can not calculate the direction of your graph in any point. This is quite surprising, since you can feel there is a sort of direction the motion is going to. However, if you know the direction, the motion would not be random and this is impossible.

After the lunch break we joined the physicists and astrophysicists in their program. Alex will write about that soon.

In the afternoon and evening students from study association FYSKAM organized an activity with us. They brought soda, beer, burgers and two typical Swedish games and we met the whole afternoon and evening in the shining warm sun. One of the typical Swedish games was Kubbe, where you need to throw wooden sticks to the blocks of the other team while avoiding the Kings block. If you throw over the Kings block before throwing over the other blocks, you lose. If you first throw over the Kings block after throwing over the other blocks, you win. In such a meeting I’m always amazed by how similar Dutch and foreign students are. The saying “you can sleep when you are dead”, the item “toilet duck” and stealing certain artifacts from your host, to alert them that they need to be guarded, came to me as very familiar.

Until the departure time of the train (10 pm), we all had the time to explore the city of Uppsala. We discovered a nice overview and got something to drink at the old station of Uppsala that was renovated to a luxurious restaurant and cafe.

All good things come to an end, as well as to this day and this blog. After a train drive back to Stockholm, we posted this blog to let you enjoy our day further when we sleep.

The quotes of the day are made by Sebastiaan and Jelco:

Sebastiaan: “Upps, a la did it again!”

Takis Konstantopoulos: “If an extremely drunk person starts randomly walking, when will he come back?” Jelco: “When he is sober again.”

Signed by Mathijs Kolkhuis Tanke & Kevin Oost

I don’t know if any of you have ever seen the metro of Stockholm, but it feels like a dwarven kingdom, especially when you walk through Stockholm at night and there is nobody to be seen, but as soon as you descend into the depths of those cavernous tunnels, you find a great many people walking around

Today we travelled to AlbaNova, a “research and education initiative run jointly by the Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University”. We started the day with a lecture about type 1.5 Superconductivity by Egor Babaev. In short, there are two types of conductivity. Type 1 & Type 2, and this man found another type. The interesting thing about superconductivity is that it was one of the best understood physical problems in the field of Statistical Physics. However, this was in the case of extremely low temperature super conductivity. Then, one day, found a superconductor at ‘high’ temperatures. Although it’s super cool, I would not recommend touching this magnet Haha.
Anyways, this was 30 years ago and now we still don’t have a clue how these high temperature superconducters can exist. And to make a long story short, this professor and his coleagus found a third type somewhere inbetween type one and two, which is and was a huge discovery.

After a short break things got real dense, as in condensed matter physics. Our lecturer Mats Willin managed to squize an entire Masters Degree of subjects into an two hour talk, and because of the enthousiastic way he lectured it was an amazing talk. We talked about phase transitions and statistical properties of matter. That is, we know the properties of a single atom, but when you add many together, as in 10^23 many, you get emergent properties in your system that simply don’t exist as single atom properties. These two quotes sum it up quite nicely:

“The whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts.”

“Technically all the gas-atoms in this room have the same probability to be in any part of the room. So technically, it could be possible that all of the air in the room would move to your half of the lecture room, and I would die quite a horrible death. Luckily for me, statistics tells us that such a deviation from the most probable distribution (An even distribution) is so unlikely that it is just unphysical”

After the lunch break we continued onwards with lectures by a team of Quantum physicists. They gave lectures about Quantum entanglement, single photon sources, and extremely sensitive photon detection systems. I wish I could give you all an easy explanation of these subjects, but I must admit that the after lunch dip combined with a dark lecture hall wasn’t exactly the optimal configuration for my concentration. The essence of the first talk boils down to the fact that you can create photons in pairs, and when you measure properties of one of these photons it influences the properties of the other photon. And depending on how you interpret these results you can either say there is some form of communication faster than light between this pair, instantaneous as far as we know. Einstein referred to this phenomena “Spooky action at a distance”, so if even Einstein gave it a name like this, you might understand when even we get confused by what they are talking about.

The single photon detector was quite an amazing piece of engineering, as it was smaller than a euro coin:

The final lecture of the day was a talk by Oscar Larson, which was really refreshing and funny at the end of the day. It wasn’t as purely scientific, although we learned a lot about astronomic particles and how they trie to detect these.

This evening everybody had some time to explore the city for themselves, and Stockholm is a beautiful city with many, many, many palaces and such on seemingly every corner of the street

We finish with the best joke of the day:

Do you know why all of these bottles are red?
It’s because of the dopper effect (All our drink bottles are red bottles from dopper).

In the morning we went to the city of Kista, just a little metro drive from our hostel away, to visit the Computer Science department of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, from now on referred to as KTH. Our day started with Thomas Sjöland, the department head for Software and Computer Systems. He talked about the KTH institute in general and how their school of ICT is organized. Afterwards Anders Västberg, the head of Undergraduate Education, talked about how the education in the Computer Science department is organized and what kind of bachelor and masters programs KTH has to offer. He invited everyone of us to apply at one of their programs as full-time, exchange or another type of student.

Then Christian Schulte, a professor at KTH, gave a lecture about constraint programming. One example of constraint programming is solving a sudoku. Everyone field in a sudoku is a variable and the numbers from 0 to 9 are the constraints. Then one has to fill in the fields according to the sudoku rules. Then for every field a set of possible numbers can be described. After describing these sets, you can eliminate numbers from sets in a smart way. For example, with the sets x={1,2,3}, y={1,2} and z={1,2}, one can deduce that x=3 must hold. Then he moved on to more difficult puzzles. You can try one at home. Look at the equation SEND + SOME = MONEY. Every letter is a number from 0 until and including 9 and every letter holds a distinct number. Assign to each letter a number such that the equation holds. The more amazing example was a kakuro. He tried to solve a simple kakuro from the newspapers with constraint programming, which originally took almost 3 minutes for a computer. Then he wanted to solve a Japanese huge kakuro, but after 6 months of computation he stopped the program from calculating the solution. Then he made a smart algorithm that solved the newspaper kakuro in 45 milliseconds and the Japanese in 245 milliseconds.

The next part of the program was a lecture about the Electrum laboratory and a guided tour through the lab. The laboratory is focused on making faster computer chips for various purposes, including heat detection, phone chips and medical solutions. Nils Nordell, head of the Electrum lab, first showed us the wet room, where non-clean experiments were run. Then we continued to the clean room, where there is at most 1000 particles per square foot. We walked not in but around the clean room and Nils Nordell showed us all the process steps from researching a nanoparticles to manufacturing the end product. These facilities can, after payment, also be used by companies who not have the resources to build their own clean rooms. The lecture was held by Per-Erik Hellström, a docent at KTH, who described which machines where used in the clean room for research, for building mobile phone chips and for other purposes.

After the lunch break we moved on to the main KTH campus in Stockholm where the mathematical program would take place. First I was a little bit disoriented by the floor numbers; when I walked through the front door I was on floor 5. However we found the lecture fairly quickly and Kristian Bjerklöv received us for his lecture. His lecture was titled: “Dynamics of quasi-periodic driven systems”. At first he defined a dynamical system. His lecture was focused on the circle. First define a function that sends points from the circle to other points on the circle. If you track what happens to every point on the circle after many times applying the function, then you have a dynamical system. The systems Kristian Bjerklöv focused on were systems that were influenced by external force. If you track the multiplication of rabbits, the strength of the sun is an external force since the rabbits are happier with more sun but the sun does not shine brighter due to a rabbits climax. Then he elaborately explained what kind of dynamical systems were purely chaotic and which systems behaved in a more fashioned way.

Secondly Maria Saprykina gave a energetic lecture about the behavior of pendulums. Suppose you have two or more pendulums. What will happen to the motion of those pendulums if they are disconnected and what will happen to the motion of those pendulums if they were connected? It happened to be that disconnected pendulums move independent of each other, as you would expect. If you have two pendulums connected by a rubber, then they also move independent of each other. If you have three or more connected pendulums, then everything from nothing to outright chaos can happen. If you set the initial conditions perfectly right, you can let the pendulums swing in the exact order as you want. This is all due to irrational shifts

The last lecture was from Danijela Damjanovic, who gave a really interacting mathematics lecture which is rare. She started with the first question: a biologist is measuring bacteria. There are 2^n*x bacteria with n the number of days and x the starting amount of bacteria. Then a mathematician walked in and asked: is there a positive n such that 12345 are the starting digits of the amount of bacteria? After a few minutes of deductions using irrational shifts we concluded that for any set of starting digits and for any starting amount of bacteria, there is always an n. The next question was about the placing of 12345 at the decimals. The answer is no. The third question is the same as the second, but then with 2^n*3^mx bacteria. This answer is yes. To conclude the lecture, she stated a famous open question from Furstenberg and Erdös.

To conclude this blog, we will give our quote of the day, which is in Dutch to preserve humor:

Vera tegen Alex: “Jij bent zo A(re)laxed!”

Signed by Kevin Oost & Mathijs Kolkhuis Tanke

We arrived at Lund, again facing the difficult logistics within Denmark and Sweden in general. But Danish and Swedish people speak fluent English and within a short time frame we had two JOJO cards which enabled us to go to the MAX IV Laboratory (yes, named in order after previously doing research in lab 1, 2 and 3). Fun fact about the bus ride was that the bus driver gave us a small tour around Lund. He talked about new buildings planned to be constructed soon and how these would fit in the area (“How” he said, “I don’t know!”). His other major joke made the quote of the day, visible below.

Leaving the bus with applause, we saw a large shiny building. The computer scientists and mathematicians started the visit in this brand new radiation lab, which isn’t even fully updated on Wikipedia and Google Maps yet, with a tour. This laboratory is so new that the official opening of their greatest particle accelerator is at the 21st of June. The tour went through the small ring, which is now in its testing phases. Not only do they need to provide reliable access to tens of thousands of devices, but also allow complex automation and ensure sustainability. Especially Computer Scientists were amazed by the enormous IT environment. The main purpose of MAX IV is to allow the scientists to do their experiments in a flexible and user friendly environment. Vincent Hardion described the architecture of the distributed environment and the tools used for data acquisition and data management. After that Galina Skripka talked about the program to derive accurate atomic reference data for astrophysical applications, including experiments and calculations.

Now, we’re not even halfway the 6 hour ride towards Stockholm. There we will be staying at hostel Lodge32, which is at walking distance to the Stockholm Center. Tonight everyone will explore Stockholm to their own liking. Everyone heard many stories about Stockholm, so we are excited to what this city has to offer. Everyone caught up with their sleep during this train ride, so we are fresh and rearing to explore.

Public transport bus driver while riding us to MAX IV: “At your left you can see the main buildings of Ericsson and Sony.” Then while making a turn around some empty land: “And to your left you can see — nothing.”

Signed by Kevin Oost and Mathijs Kolkhuis Tanke.

We started of the day with a lecture by Dutch theoretical physicist Niels Ober, which he fittingly gave in the Niels Bohr Institute. He talked about gravity, the classical model of Newtonian gravity up to gravity according to Einstein. The first half of the lecture led to the conclusion:

matter tells space how to curve, space tells matter how to move
~John Weeler

Next he talked about quantum mechanics and how gravity is the only one of the four universal forces that has not yet been unified with Quantum Mechanics (The other ones being the Strong and Weak nuclear forces, and the Electromagnetic force). He could have continued on for a lot longer, but we had to be on our way already to the Natural History Museum.

Here we were greated by Elishevah van Kooten. An Astrochemist from the startech devision who studied in Amsterdam. She told us about meteorites, and how the abundunces and ratios of elements could tell us where they were formed in the beginning of the solarsystem and also how we could use them to learn about the formation of the solarsystem.

After a short break David Rapetti, an observational and theoretical physicist, talked about cosmological moddeling and fitting cosmological models to our observations. It was most noticable that we were dealing with an astronomer when the fire alarm went off. He pretended he didn’t notice untill after about 5 minutes, the signal to noise ratio had become so high that it was certain we were indeed hearing a fire alarm, instead of random noise.

Quickly moving on we took the bus to the Department of Mathematics, were Jesper Nygard introduced us to the center for Quantum devices and quantum electronics. He talked about things we of quantum mechanical technologies that will change the world, and gave us the following insight:

20 years is always the best bet for difficult science. 50 years is to long as it count be covered by ones scientific career and is therefore not interesting. However, 5 years is to short, it puts to much pressure on a scientist to impress. Therefore, 20 years is a always the safest bet. So we can expect Quantum Computers in perhaps 20 years. When I started studying it was also 20 years.

~Jesper Nygard

Next a masters student at the institute told us about his research into majorana particles and ‘braiding’ these particles to encode information, which is another stepping stone towards Quantum computing.

Last but not least we were given a lecture about nano spectroscopy and several of it’s aplications, such as creating images sharper than the diffraction limit, which is really exciting for us familiar with the term, but probably not very telling to anybody else.

At the end of the day we had a very nice Pizza-dinner, which you can read more about in the W&I post. I hope you’ve enjoyed the Blog’s so far. Tomorrow we will be traveling to Stockholm, which will hopefully be as easy as reaching Copenhagen.

Cheers,

Alex van Vorstenbosch

After lunch, the Computer Science group went off to visit Penneo, a company which started back in 2011 in a basement with 3 people. Now, it does consulting for over 400+ companies in Denmark. Penneo has developed an electronic signature solution that enables companies sign legally binding documents online in a quick and secure way using the so called nemID (can be compared to a DigiD in the Netherlands). Three cofounders of Penneo talked about how to start and develop an IT-company. They told us about all the mistakes they’ve made as a startup, and how they are now building product/systems/teams to enable them to scale across Europe. In the late afternoon Balder Onarheim gave us an introduction to neuroscience and his company mindsettr.com, which they aim to implement to stimulate the brain in a safe and simple-to-use manner.

The mathematicians had their own program in the afternoon. The first lecture was from Sho Tanimoto. The lecture was titled ‘rational points on algebraic varieties’. An variety is a space that looks like a line, surface or a higher dimensional equivalent object. One example is the sphere which locally looks like a surface, an other example is the circle that is locally a line. An algebraic variety are the zeros of some polynomial equations like x^2+y^2-z^2=0. Then there are three questions one can ask: are their rational solutions to such equations, how many rational solutions to such equations are there and how are the rational solutions distributed on the variety? Sho Tanimoto further explored those questions and in particular the third since that question coincides with his research area.

After a short break we had a talk from Dustin Clausen about the Hopf map. The Hopf map is in his own words ‘a very complicated way for the sphere to give the circle a hug’. He first started building spheres while making hilarious puns and comments along the way. One way to build a sphere is to cramp the edge of a surface together, like making a ball from a piece of paper. Then he showed how many really different ways there are to build a map from a sphere from one dimension to a sphere from the other dimension. In most cases all maps are essentially the same, but for dimension higher than 1 there are countable infinite amount of really different maps. The Hopf map is a map from the sphere to the circle and is really different than just bringing every point to the equator. This map is a very recent result of topology and was the first example that showed a fiber bundle existed.

The last lecture was from Jérémy Sok, a French postdoctoral researcher. Jérémy gave an introduction to mathematical physics. He started with the famous equation of Newton, namely force equals mass times acceleration. He then rewrote the equation in Lagragian mechanics, which gave a huge integral. After working out the integral, he showed that the complex computations were a generalization of the famous equation. Afterwards he gave many examples of mathematics applied in physics.

In the evening we enjoyed an unlimited pizza buffet at the study association Science RADET of Copenhagen together with the physics and astronomy group. Afterwards most went to the local student bar StudentenHuset in the centre of Copenhagen. A nice thing to notice is that the Copenhagens metro is fully automatic without any driver. This enables the metro to run the entire night, since a driver is not necessary anymore. See the featured image.

Quotes of the day:

After Nicolai, investor in Penneo, recieved his presents consisting of various Dutch sweets, he said: “You don’t have this candy for us?” while pretending to hold a joint.

Dustin was lecturing while Sho brought new markers for the whiteboard. Later Dustin said: “Was Sho here for the markers? So he did Sho’d up!”

Signed by Kevin Oost and Mathijs Kolkhuis Tanke

Inside the planetarium we went to a huge IMAX theater, where a beautiful 3D-show about the vast universe and global warming was viewed. Afterwards everyone was off to enjoy the nice sunny weather and the city of Copenhagen. Now we give an excerpt from the day of two groups.

Very close to the Planetarium is the Trivoli amusement park situated, where one group went off to. Fairy tale writer Hans Christian Andersen visited the park, as did Walt Disney and many other celebrities, who all fell in love with the gardens. After this lovely scenery, we traveled by metro to the famous Nyhavn, shown on the featured image. The area was packed with people enjoying their drinks. Nyhavn was originally a busy commercial port where ships from all over the world would dock. Then we walked further to visit the famous Little Mermaid, who concluded our day.

The other group chose to first walk aimlessly through the many streets of Copenhagens centrum. They decided to discover Copenhagen in a unique way, namely by boat. One person has a boat license valid in Copenhagen, one other has much experience on the water, so they found a rental and rented a boat. Their plan was to visit the Little Mermaid by boat, however the currents of the canal were too strong in that area. Instead they sailed through the canals of Copenhagen. Sailing into Nyhavn was not permitted, but they could not resist to sail a little in the port and place a nice rectangular De Leidsche Flesch sticker among many other on the bridge there.

We conclude this blog with best two quotes of the day, which are written in Dutch to preserve humor:

Alex tegen Mathijs over de portofoon: ‘Kun je aan Kevin vragen welke richting we lopen?’ Mathijs: ‘We lopen richting zuiden’. Alex: ‘Ow, ik dacht dat we “Oost” gingen’.

Vera over Paul en Mathijs: ‘Samen kunnen jullie ongeveer alles’. Paul: ‘Nee, we kunnen geen kinderen krijgen.’

Signed by Kevin Oost and Mathijs Kolkhuis Tanke

The hostel ‘Sleep in Heaven’ is quite the cozy place, with bunkbeds 3 stories high!
We’ll have a breakfast prepared here for us in the morning, and there is a very big and sociable lounge were I am sitting as I write this very first official blogpost of the Studytrip.

Everybody was free to explore the city for a nice dinner-place, and we have another comforting idea for the parents at home: An øl (Beer) costs almost 7 euros here, so it is sure to be a very productive weekend.

Tomorrow we will start the day by visiting the Tycho Brahe Planetarium with the whole group,
after this all the participants will be free to enjoy the culture of Copenhagen.

Quote of the day:

“We’ve arrived in Hipster paradise!”

Signed by Alex van Vorstenbosch

On this website you can see information about the committee, the program or the travel information and hostels.

The studytrip is organized for students of year 2 and higher. During the trip we’ll post some updates to keep everyone at home updated.