Introduction
Welcome to the personal homepage of Pascal Steger. Find an overview of the contents in the navigation panel to the right.
It is a pleasure to introduce myself: Born in the late 80s, I am
currently living in Zurich, Switzerland, studying Extragalactic
Astrophysics at ETH Zurich. My
interests range from physics (what a coincidence 
) to IT infrastructure and technical
aspects of aviation and cycling all the way to basketball. The exact
whereabouts of my person as well as a short overview of my career can
be found in the private section.
But enough of myself. Why don′t you lean back and free your mind for an amusing hour of brain activity? I have gathered some of the more appealing problems turning up during the last three years, and want to share with you the joy of working on them. They span a range of different topics, usually not found together. To make it more challenging, you won′t be given any hints as usually is done in academics. Never say die, though! An old latin proverb states: "Bonus vir semper tiro", a good man is always a beginner.
For your convenience, the scripts on basic physics, my private Wiki named Vicky or a meta search engine are at your hands. Disce aut discede!
Problems
By clicking on the category name, you get to the respective solution section, so you can compare your findings with mine.
Astronomy
- Let two galaxies merge using GalCrash and determine all interesting parameters.
- Describe the properties of a 2-element adding radio interferometer!
- Where was the Sun during the second week in 2008? Where were A Cassiopeiae and A Cygni? Split the time between sunrise and sunset in three parts and determine the positions right in the middle of the corresponding interval.
- Simulate the earth-moon system using assembler.
- Write a program to simulate a classical three-body problem using a leap-frog algorithm.
- Run a Gadget-2 simulation on a Phenom9750 / SuSE environment. You might install MPICH, gsl, fftw(-mpi) beforehands.
- Analyze a Gadget-2 snapshot file of a cosmological simulation and search for correlations between angular momenta , inertia axes and mass or position vector for both gas and dark matter particles.
Solid State and Theoretical Physics
- How do the Brioullin-zones look like for a two-dimensional, rectangular array?
- Describe the magnetic properties of MnS. You may use an experimental setup as did Shull 1949.
-
Describe two models for Quantum Computation.
Fractals
- Write a program (php/cpp) to zoom into the Mandelbrot set z -> z2+c using the pixel algorithm.
- Write a program (php/cpp) to draw a Koch flake or other L-systems. The use of recursion is encouraged.
Combinatorics
| 1 | 2 | 5 | 4 | 6 | 3 |
| 5 | 3 | 6 | 1 | 4 | 2 |
| 4 | 6 | 3 | 5 | 2 | 1 |
| 2 | 1 | 4 | 3 | 5 | 6 |
| 3 | 5 | 2 | 6 | 1 | 4 |
| 6 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 5 |
-
Given following setup: You have a square of 6x6 towers, with sizes 1..6 distributed such that in each row and column there is only one tower of a given size. You furthermore have a set of 6x6 colored bricks, each color with bricks of size from 1 to 6. A brick is set validly, if there is only one brick of a given color in each row and column and if
size(brick) + size(tower) = 7i.e. all bricks end up on the same level. Find an algorithm to produce a correct mapping for the tower sizes in the table to the right.
- Same exercise as before. In order to check the validity of the above code, write a program that steps through all valid color permutations and searches the lowest deflection from equal height.
- For mathematicians: Discuss on the number of possible solutions. Generalize for arbitrary sizes of the array.
Languages
- Read the following biography of Jurij Gagarin and translate it into german. Additionally give a short summary in russian.
- Write down in morse code the following text: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." You may use a dash for "dah" and a point for "dit".
-
Listen to
morse sound and write down what is sent, either by hand or directly into your keyboard. In reality the text would probably be sent with little higher speed. And with some random spaces between characters and words.
Programming
- How can you teach a computer? Sketch a model and discuss on its feasibility!
- Suppose you want that all teachers in a school give marks for all students. The whole thing must run on a webserver, in a LAMP environment. How could this be accomplished?
- Given a set of (xi,yi), i=1...N. Program a set of artificial intelligence routines to find the best fit interpolating formula. Quality is measured by the sum of least square distances in x or x&y direction.
Download Section
There exists some really interesting software to help you with solving those problems. Explore the cagibi.
Summary
I presented some of the little tasks I had to fulfill myself. Go ahead and search for new challenges by yourself. 
There are lots!
Questions ???
If you found something unclear 
about this site, do not hesitate to contact me. Often others will struggle with the same problems you have found here, so be sure to let me know. I am also glad to get general feedback, candies, and all other things that could go under donations. Whether I will ever get something? I will let you know...