Tag: Matrix

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Ice by John Hawkhead

a deep understanding
of the chemistry of ice
cracks in our matrix

by John Hawkhead

Whilst the poem above was written by the author, the below background to it was provided by Google AI:

Ice as a Matrix

Ice, the frozen form of water, can act as a matrix or a medium to hold other substances in place. 

Applications:

  • Cryopreservation: Ice matrices are used in cryopreservation techniques to freeze and preserve biological samples by embedding them in ice, which helps to minimize ice crystal formation and damage to the samples. 
  • Material Science: Ice matrices can be used for encapsulating or embedding materials for research purposes, such as studying the properties of materials in a frozen state or for creating composite materials. 
  • Protein Analysis: Ice matrices are used in techniques like IR-MALDI (Infrared Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption/Ionization) to analyze proteins in frozen samples. 
  • Film Production: Matrix-assisted pulsed laser evaporation (MAPLE) uses water ice as a matrix for producing thin films of materials like polyethylene glycol (PEG). 

Further reading:

‘Structure of Ice’, LibreTexts Chemistry, available: https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_Chemistry/Introductory_Chemistry_(CK-12)/15%3A_Water/15.02%3A_Structure_of_Ice

‘Chemistry of Ice’, 2020, NBC News Learn, YouTube, available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQOTV8d6QLA

‘Structures of Ice’, 2025, Zumdahl, S.S., Encyclopaedia Britannica, available: https://www.britannica.com/science/water/Structures-of-ice

Author bio:

John Hawkhead (@haikuhawk.bsky.social) is a writer and artist from the south-west of England. His work has been published globally over the last 25 years, including three books of haiku / senryu: ‘Small Shadows’ and ‘Bone Moon’ (available from Alba Publishing. http://www.albapublishing.com/) and ‘Four Horse Parable’ (available from Nun Prophet Press).

Read more of John’s sciku here!

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Low-rank Representation by Dr David Keyes

Vast sea of numbers,

Can you be described by few,

As bones define flesh?

 

Many data objects, such as matrices, which are traditionally described by providing a high precision number for every (row,column) entry, can be represented to usefully high precision by many fewer numbers. This so-called “data sparsity” holds for the mathematical descriptions of many physical and statistical phenomena whose effects or correlations decay smoothly with distance.

An apparently complex interaction or relationship is, with a special perspective, much simpler. In an extreme limit, we can lump the moon’s gravitational effect on the Earth by assuming that all of its distributed mass is concentrated at a single point. The potential to represent dense matrices by products of a small number of vectors (the number needed is called the “rank”) is analogous to this and leads to huge savings in memory and operations when manipulating such objects. The effect of the whole can be represented by a carefully defined abstraction. One version of this technique is called “skeletonization,” which suggests the Sciku above. For an example of this philosophy, see Yokota et al, 2014.

Original research:  https://doi.org/10.14529/jsfi140104

David Keyes directs the Extreme Computing Research Center at KAUST, where he was a founding dean in 2009. He inhabits the intersection of Mathematics, Computer Science, and applications, with a focus on colonizing emerging energy-efficient architectures for scientific computations. He is a Fellow of SIAM and AMS and has received the ACM Gordon Bell Prize and the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award. As a lover of poetry, he is delighted to discover the Sciku community.

Enjoyed this sciku? Check out David’s other sciku: Algorithmic complexity.