Jonathon Liu
University of Melbourne
Biography
Jonathon Liu is a Chancellor’s Scholar at the University of Melbourne, where he studies physics and pure mathematics. Previously, Jonathon undertook the ANU Summer Research Scholarship program, where he developed code to simulate the propagation of positrons through interstellar space. Also, he recently spent a semester on exchange at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he was fortunate enough to take a discrete mathematics course of the Yao Class, taught by Turing Award recipient Andrew Yao. He is interested in all things pure mathematical, especially fields with applications in physics and computer science. Outside of mathematics, Jonathon enjoys playing soccer and debating.
Directed Walk Model for Polymer Propagation
A polymer is a long molecule composed of connected subcomponents called monomers. Examples of polymers include DNA and proteins. Mathematically, we can consider polymers as being embedded into a discretised space in order to i) obtain integer answers to questions like ‘how many configurations of the polymer are there?’, and ii) bring to bear a range of combinatorial tools. The goal of this project is to apply combinatorial ideas as well as numerical methods to analyse a simplified version of this model, where we consider ‘directed walks’.