Welcome, traveller.
This web page is outdated. Please go to my current page.
This is Erik Schnetter, currently a postdoc at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen. I am what people call a research scientist in the fields of numerical relativity at the Department of Theoretical Astrophysics (TAT). I am working in the SFB 382 in the Teilprojekt B1. I sit in office C10P28, and you are looking at my home page. Some of my publications are available online.
In 1999 and 2000, I spent some time at Penn State in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics close to the Center for Gravitational Physics & Geometry. As a member of the numerical relativity group I started to collide black holes.
Currently I am working on computer simulations of black hole spacetimes. Among other things I am developing the Tiger code (Tiger aka TGR: Tübingen General Relativity code). This is a sprout of the Maya code that performs constrained evolution and contains special gauge conditions.
In August 2003, our institute offered a workshop on Numeric and analytic properties of the vacuum Einstein equations.
I use PETSc to solve elliptic equations. My Cactus thorns TATelliptic and TATPETSc provide a nice interface to the nonlinear solver.
My AMR driver Carpet works with the Cactus toolkit. I also have a collection of utility thorns for Cactus for various purposes, which goes by the name TAT arrangement.
MayaVi is a visualisation tool based on the VTK library. I wrote some tools that convert Cactus ASCII and HDF5 output files into the VTK format expected by MayaVi.
I have some stuff accumulated that some people were interested in at some time:
Some initial data for some SPH simulations of stars being disrupted near a supermassive black hole. These data are remnants of simulations I performed for Peter Mészáros from fall 1999 to spring 2000. There were problems with the standalone numerical stability of the star that I wanted to disrupt. Sadly, my advisor's and mine interests shifted, and these issues were never resolved.
Results from testing the Maya code in almost-trivial situations. Maya is a 3d code to evolve the Einstein equations in time. This is not a trivial task, and about everything (the equations themselves, boundary conditions, gauge conditions, discretisations etc.) are not well researched and might well be unstable. By testing the code one finds out about insulas of stability as well as bugs in the code.
My Diplomarbeit was about "Research towards implementing radiative transport in the SPH formalism". Believe it or not, I received an email asking for a copy... So here it is. Of course, it is in German.
Some years ago I was interested in the computer language Sather, produced/invented at ICSI. The project at ICSI since died, and a few brave people are trying to hold Sather's flame alight as a GNU project. I have some contributions to Sather, but they all have aquired a severe case of bit-rot by now.
The future of programming languages lies not in object oriented languages, but in functional languages. During an idle moment in 2000, when I was checking out the language Haskell, I thought of posing a challenge to the newgroup comp.lang.functional. (Did you notice that the two groups comp.lang.fortran and comp.lang.functional come right after each other in an alphabetical listing?) I then refrained from doing so, because I didn't want to become the target of a flame war.
There is an interesting project underway, called gcc-g95, that seeks to produce a free (as in both speech and beer) Fortran 95 compiler, based on gcc, the GNU compiler collection. I like Fortran, thus I track this project, and I have produced some thoughts on how to implement the necessary run time library. By the way, I would like to see support for OpenMP or HPF (High Performance Fortran) in this compiler, too...
My email is as private as my paper mail. I support encrypting and signing email messages. Tell me if I can encrypt email messages to you. You can find more information about privacy and encryption at the international PGP home page, at the GNU privacy guard's page, and at privacy.org. I do have a PGP key with the ID 09E8DDFD. You can get it directly from me, or from a public key server by searching for my name. My key's fingerprint is 6EB5 1217 6046 069B E6B8 F2E3 9B7B A24B 09E8 DDFD, but if you are going through the trouble of checking fingerprints, you wouldn't trust a web page, would you?
Science is not enough to feed the brains of us human beings. We also desire art and philosophy. My aunt Jo Stoyanov is an artist, as is her sister Heri Hablick. Martina Nehr, one of our department's secretaries, is also a paintress. Another aunt of mine, Martina Rockstroh, plays the guitar in the band Juke Joint Ramblers, and promises me that the band's web pages will be up real soon now. She's also moderating in the Freies Radio Wüste Welle. And a colleague of mine, Scott Hawley, is a singer / songwriter / guitarist / physicist, maybe even in this order.
November 14 is Monet's birthday. Google even had a special logo for this occasion.
Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, one Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
"Lord of the Rings", J.R.R. Tolkien
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Last modified: Sun Dec 9 23:23:46 CET 2007