Public Biography
Wendy Oyelaran is a fourth-year graduate student in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and since 2023 the only member of the research group of Dr. Rolf Ekelund. She does not have a thesis problem. Dr. Ekelund, who will not assign a problem that cannot be solved by one person at a desk with a pencil, has been looking for one “her size” since 2022 and has, by her account, been very thorough about it, having gone through everything up to 1930.
Ms. Oyelaran, 27, received her bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2021 and was admitted to Caltech on the strength of a senior thesis in computational condensed-matter physics, which she wrote on a computer. In the interval since, she has been running numerical simulations of a spin glass at night, on a laptop, in her car, in a parking structure on Wilson Avenue, with the dome light off. “I’m running Monte Carlo in a Honda,” she has said. “It’s not what I pictured.” Dr. Ekelund does not know. He would know, she notes, if he had email.
Articles
- Artisanal Physicist Laments That All the Easy Problems Have Been Solved, Most of Them Before 1930 — Dr. Ekelund’s sole graduate student, without a thesis problem, doing numerics in her car
Articles
- Artisanal Physicist Laments That All the Easy Problems Have Been Solved, Most of Them Before 1930 — “A gallbladder is an easy problem,” Dr. Ekelund said of a Berkeley surgeon who recently removed one by hand. “He had one. I would like to know where he got it.”