 The Scientist:
Claire Trenham BSc
School of Maths and Physics, University of Tasmania
Claire is from Kettering, south of Hobart, and went to Woodbridge District High School from Kinder to Grade 10, and then to Hobart College. “Woodbridge is a small school with only about 40 students in each grade,” says Claire. “For me the transition from high school to college was a greater challenge than starting uni.”
After excelling in the sciences and mathematics in high school, Claire studied maths and the physical sciences at pre-tertiary level in college. Her teachers encouraged her to continue on to do engineering or science at university, and she enrolled to do a BSc.
“I was always interested by how things worked, colours and prisms and crystals and flames, all sorts of things that you look at and think ‘I wonder why...’ as a kid. I’ve always absolutely loved patterns and finding order in things, be it numbers, colours, letters, and these led me easily into an enjoyment of mathematics, even mathematical puzzles and word puzzles in my spare time!”
At university, Claire majored in maths and physics. She also studied chemistry in the first two years. She is now enrolled in Honours in mathematics, where she is working on an applied maths project.
“My thesis topic is actually mathematical modelling of chemical combustion, so there’s still a bit of physics, and even chemistry, thrown in,” she says.
For Claire, the thing she most enjoys about maths and physics is seeing the patterns in the world and by studying those patterns to learn how the world works.
“It’s an awesome feeling to know and understand why things happen, even little things like rainbows. To me, the ‘privilege’ of knowledge obtained by studying these sciences far outweighs the effort required to do so. That’s why I study science. I find the applied maths, such as calculus, chaos (related to my project) and fluid mechanics, the most interesting, as in these subjects I see the direct application to ‘real life’ and learn how to solve the problems that nature throws up at us when we don’t understand them intuitively in some sense, particularly chaos!”
More About the Work
Key words: Chemical combustion, equations, chaos
Claire says: What I do is formulate equations that describe a physical system [in this case, chemical combustion] and code them on the computer. The computer solves the equations or does whatever needs doing and tells me how the system behaves and whether there’s chaos, which I can then analyse.
Chemical combustion:
Combustion in every day language means burning. For chemical combustion to happen there must be a two ingredients: Fuel (e.g. wood) and oxygen. This chemical reaction produces heat and usually light (e.g. a candle flame). Many of the common items that burn (e.g. wood, coal, gas), are organic. When something is organic it means it is (or was) alive and is made up of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. These three elements form the basis of life! There are many many combinations of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, and the different ways these three elements are combined make up the different kinds of organic fuel.
The many combinations of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen are examples of nature’s patterns. The whole natural world can be described in patterns and orders of patterns, from different rocks and minerals, to snowflakes, to flowers, to the burning of organic matter, to the movement of our winds and oceans.
Examples of the different combinations of carbon (grey) and
hydrogen (red) and oxygen (usually not shown)
Chaos Theory
Chaos theory attempts to explain the fact that complex and unpredictable results can and will occur in systems that are sensitive to their initial conditions. A common example of this is known as the Butterfly Effect. It states that, in theory, the flutter of a butterfly’s wings in China could, in fact, actually effect weather patterns in New York City, thousands of miles away. In other words, it is possible that a very small occurrence can produce unpredictable and sometimes drastic results by triggering a series of increasingly significant events.
Websites:
NASA combustion science
https://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/teachers/microgravity/MGprim1.html
Exploring conditions needed for combustion to occur
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/teachers/activities/2908_fire3.html
The Chaos Experience
https://library.thinkquest.org/3120
Talking Up Science
https://www.hsn.csiro.au/talkup/topics.html
School of Maths and Physics, University of Tasmania
http;//www.utas.edu.au/mathswww.utas.edu.au/physics
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