Who: Rod Vance
Contact: rodv@optiscan.com
Where: Melbourne, Australia
Interests (Personal): Spending time with my partner, Merrindal (Mindal) and daughter Nakira, our cats Freyja and Zeus, drinking coffee in the street whilst reading a good book or with friends, Nordic skiing, learning about animals, loving animals (including human ones), swimming, languages, especially old and middle english, singing.
Interests (Professional): Theoretical Optics, quantum optics, diverse topics in mathematics, especially complex analysis, Lie groups and other non-commutative stuff (particularly quaternions and matrix representations). My work is for Optiscan Imaging, where I apply my optical and signal processing bent to miniaturised confocal and other microscopes for medical applications. I am especially interested in modern conceptions of the photon, particularly the photon wave function as conceived by Iwo Bialynicki-Birula and Margaret Hawton as well as recent work on the photon position operator by Professor Hawton. I would like to see the question of divergence of the ground state energy for vacuum states significantly further discussed in my lifetime. I also hope that there are still tigers in the wild when I die.
Likes: My partner, all cats, sleeping in. The fact that my job allows me to be a mad scientist whilst doing something useful for people.
Dislikes: Human arrogance, the belief that the world belongs to humans, the cult of materialism. The Liberal Party of Australia, especially its leader tony abbott. The bump sticking out of my right foot.
Favourite Scientist: Ummm... probably Richard Feynman. I certainly greatly admire the The Feynman Lectures on Physics.
List of Wikipedia Contributions
- Updates, noting Prof Wulf Rossmann's teaching method to Lie groups page
- In Progress: The photon wave function.