What’s on my mind?

I have been re-doing and updating that section of my web site that describes my research interests. In so doing, I’ve found myself asking how someone who only knows my scientific outputs would have written that same section… I have not gotten a solid answer to that question, of course, but I have had some fun with one of those tools that gets so much praise by the professional development kaboodle: the wordcloud!

What I’ve done is take all the titles of my scientific papers, conference papers, conference talks and all the abstract of my scientific papers and put them into a single file and created a Word cloud! After the removal of words that I deemed not to relate to the science (see detail of process below), I looked into the word cloud mirror shown below:

The editing done to the word cloud was done using a bit of bash programming (for the nerds, here’s the code, but essentially contained three manual steps: 1) replacement of some words by their singular/plural, verb/noun, etc version in order to avoid duplication; 2) enforcement of composite words (such as Minkowski tensor –> Minkowski.Tensor) and 3) removal of words that were very frequent but not specific to the science (mostly fill words).