A Great Ph.D. Defense by Dr. Will Oakley

Congratulations to my Ph.D. student Will Oakley on an excellent defense of his thesis!

Congratulations to Dr. Will Oakley for a successful defense of his Ph.D. dissertation, titled "Strong Consensus-Seeking in a Model of Social Consensus Formation"! pic.twitter.com/SxCEOkMpdr

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) June 4, 2020

An Awesome Ph.D. Defense by Dr. Yacoub Kureh!

Congratulations to my Ph.D. student Yacoub Kureh on an awesome defense of his thesis!

CONGRATULATIONS to Dr. Yacoub Kureh (@Yacoub_Kureh) on a successful and very impressive defense of his PhD thesis, called "Nonlinear opinion models and other networked systems"!!! pic.twitter.com/fXDNIE1GRX

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) May 28, 2020

Quora Question: What Powers are Ph.D. Students Awarded?

I had something to say about this question.

(My Ph.D. students get awesome powers, of course! What kind of advisor do you think I am?)

Congratulations to Dr. Charlie Marshak!

Congratulations to my UCLA Ph.D. student, Charlie Marshak, for successfully passing his thesis defense on Friday the 13th and for making the final changes and submitting his thesis (Applications of Network Science to Criminal Networks, University Education, and Ecology), which we then approved.

I became one of Charlie's supervisors last fall to help out his main official supervisor Andrea Bertozzi. Of course, although she doesn't get official credit for it (because she's a postdoc and isn't in the official listing), Puck Rombach has been Charlie's main supervisor in practice.

Dumbed-Down Ph.D. Dissertation Summaries

These dumbed-down Ph.D. dissertation summaries are pretty amusing.

If you want to practice doing that yourself, you can use the Up-Goer Five Text Editor to help.

(Tip of the cap to Jaideep Singh and Maria Satterwhite for the thesis summaries and to Karen Kustedjo for the text editor.)

RIP Richard L. Liboff (1931–2014)

Steve Strogatz just e-mailed me to let me know that Richard Liboff, my PhD supervisor, has died. The obituary only came out yesterday, but Richard died on 9 March. The comment, which is recalled in the Cornell obituary, that Richard made about his book in the Spiderman movie was quintessentially him. (I remember that incident when Cornell first had a press release about it.)

Richard seemed pretty crazy at times (though, to be honest, I bet that my students would say the same thing about me!), and we ultimately had a falling out (and I couldn't get him to respond to e-mails after fall 2003 or early 2004), but I do have a soft spot for him --- and I have some of my own stories to tell, of course. Richard was quite a character, and Cornell's obituary conveys it very well. In some ways, this is like the closing of a final bit of my graduate-school chapter, although I still have strong contacts with many of the Cornell faculty.

Here is a link to Richard's wikipedia page. He is best known for his quantum mechanics book, of course. (Given how well-known his book is, I'm rather surprised that his obituary hasn't circulated much more widely. It certainly deserves to be. Through his textbooks, Richard made extremely important expository contributions to generations of young physicists and other scientists.)

I published my first science paper jointly with Richard. It is nowhere near my best paper, but it will always be my first one.

Update (5/25/14): I noticed that this blog entry was getting several hits, so I tried to figure out the mechanism via Google (no luck yet). In the process, though, I found something really interesting that I never knew: Richard self-published a novel! (Given the details of the Amazon page, I am assuming that it was self-published.)

Words of Wisdom

My words of wisdom for the day: "You don't need to be in love with a problem, but you should at least be willing to have a one-night stand."

(I said this in the context of somebody working on a PhD.)

Congratulations to Dr. Martin Gould!

My Ph.D. student Martin Gould passed his dissertation defense (aka "viva") today, and it looks like he might not have to make any corrections at all. Thus far, Martin and I have coauthored a review article on limit order books, and several additional papers are in preparation. Martin's thesis was about limit order books. The Examiners were Doyne Farmer (internal) and Rama Cont (external).

CONGRATULATIONS, Dr. Gould!

Automatic Dissertation-Title Generator

Here is an automatic generator for titles of PhD theses. My fake dissertation title is "Vesuvius Wept: A Mechanical Analysis of Popular Drinking Songs in Dante's Inferno".

The title of my actual dissertation is "Quantum Chaos in Vibrating Billiard Systems"

(Tip of the cap to Jure Leskovec.)

Congratulations to Dr. Puck Rombach!

My Ph.D. student Puck Rombach passed her dissertation defense (aka "viva") today with "Minor Corrections". It appears to be a relatively large number of minor corrections, but they're all eminently doable and it won't take long to dot all of the i's and cross all of the t's. You can find some of Puck's work on my website, as we have coauthored several papers. Puck's thesis is on a mixture of topics from pure graph theory (equitable colorings in random graphs), networks (core-periphery structure and centralities), and a couple of things that interpolate between these two extremes. The Examiners were Colin McDiarmid (internal) on the pure side and Alex Arenas (external) on the applied side.

CONGRATULATIONS, Dr. Rombach!

The Length of Doctoral Dissertations

One person compiled some statistics about the mean length of doctoral dissertations in various fields.

Just to give some context, let me point out the following: Version 1 of my PhD thesis was over 400 pages. Version 2 was about 178 pages. (Also, Version 2 was much better than Version 1.)

And, to better appreciate this length (which I would prefer to call "volume"), take a look at where mathematics lands on the chart at the other end of the link.

(Tip of the cap to Ernie Barreto.)

The Proverbial Thesis Committee

I love this issue of PhD Comics showing a stereotypical PhD thesis committee.

I'm not actually any one of these stereotypes, and I read every word of all theses I examine.

I hope to grow up to be a guru someday, though. Mmmmm... cookies.

(Tip of the cap to Mariano Beguerisse Díaz.)

Congratulations to Dr. Joseph Schaeffer!

It is once again my pleasure to announce the successful thesis defense of one of my good friends. Welcome to the club, Dr. Joe Schaeffer, who unsurprisingly had a very smooth defense of his thesis (which is in the broad area of computational biology)! I'm not putting in more details on the topic just because I'll probably get tons of things wrong if I do, and I would be relying mostly on his paper in SIAM Review that predates tons of stuff in the thesis.

My congratulations might have worked better if I didn't have a bit of a screw up with Joe's phone number, but that is a rather small glitch in the scheme of things.

Update (9/29/12): I'm not sure how I managed to forget to write this, but Joe's PhD is from Caltech and his supervisor is Erik Winfree. So those of you who want to find out more about the work in that lab now have a place to look. :)

Two-Minute Thesis Contest

PhD Comics is holding a contest that invites people to describe their PhD thesis work in 2 minutes. Jorge Cham of PhD Comics might even select to broadcast your audio file on the PhD Comics site.

Come on! You know you want to!

(Tip of the cap to Jimmy Lin.)

Congratulations to Dr. Sumeet Agarwal!

My Ph.D. student, Sumeet Agarwal, recently pass his viva. He had some proverbial "minor corrections" to make, but he mentions that it should only take a couple of days, so he'll officially be "Dr. Sumeet Agarwal" very soon. Congratulations! (Apparently, his Ph.D. defense lasted a whopping 4.5 hours, which is quite the marathon!)

The title of Sumeet's doctoral thesis is "Networks in Nature: Evolution, Dynamics and Modularity in Biological Networks". It includes work on protein-protein interaction networks but also more general things on machine learning in networks.

Congratulations to Dr. Anna Lewis!

My DPhil student Anna Lewis passed her viva "today" (the 13th --- her exam started around the same time as my flight to LA). Anna has done some excellent work on protein-protein interaction networks and unsurprisingly passed with flying colors. She just has to make a few phrasing tweaks and she'll be done.

I was trying to send my congratulatory e-mail to her, but sadly the e-mail server seems to be broken.

2011 'Dance Your PhD' Contest

Come on: you know you want to do this.

(Tip of the cap to Greg Fricke.)

Ph.D. Dissertation in Haiku Form

Here is my Ph.D. dissertation in haiku form:

Vibrating quantum billiards
have chaos.
I've moved on since then.


I know I'm late to the game, but I'm on the look-up-references part of writing chapter 2 of my book and a certain collaborator's website (hey, I'm citing you!) reminded me of this meme.

The Simpsons on Grad Students and PhDs

As is often the case, The Simpsons absolutely nails it. For example, here is a snippet about grad students and PhDs.

(Tip of the cap to Jimmy Lin and Frank Ling.)

Congratulations to Dr. Dan Fenn!

Dan Fenn, my first Ph.D. student, passed his thesis defense today with flying colors. (He has on the order of 2 hours worth of corrections that he needs to make.) His thesis concentrates mostly on topics in mathematical finance, with a focus on financial networks. He also developed some new theory related to community detection in networks.

You can find some of Dan's work in our coauthored papers that I've posted on my website (and 2 more of them will be posted very soon). Once all of the i's have been dotted and the t's have been crossed, I will post his dissertation per se.

CONGRATULATIONS, Dr. Fenn!