Welcome to Sean Hardesty's Page

I'm a fifth-year graduate student here in the CAAM department at Rice University. I'm working with Matthias Heinkenschloss on shape optimization problems.

Research

My work focuses on optimization of the acoustic characteristics of elastic shell structures (read: violins). The picture below is of a 3d scan of a violin made by Alkis Rappas, taken by capture3d.com.

Check out video of the violin built by Timothy Johnson using my plastic plate - before and after we thinned it and added ribs.

Talks and Such

Here are several talks I've given at Rice.

Introduction to Wavelets for the Violin Society of America's Acoustics Workshop (pdf)
Acoustic Optimization of Plates and Shells (pdf)
Boundary Integral Methods for Acoustic Shape Optimization (pdf)
The Reissner-Mindlin Plate Problem and MITC Finite Elements (pdf)
MA Defense Talk: Energy Bounds on Point-wise Damped Wave Operators (pdf)
Overview of the Physics of Strings VIGRE Seminar (zip)
Mathematics and the Strategy of Poker (zip)
Musical Mathematics: A Physical Perspective on the Western Scale (zip)

Jay and I made a Halloween Movie.

Check out my Traveling Salesman page.

Resume

My resume (pdf).

My 944 S2

I bought it back in 2002, and I love it. The S2 has a normally aspirated 3.0L 4-cylinder engine. Mine is often in the shop. I'm working on learning to drive it now by going to track days and autocrossing and things like that. Check out the links below.

Caltech

What can I say about Caltech? I graduated back in June of 2004 with a B.S. in Physics. I think I'm glad that I made it out alive, but I mostly had a great time while I was there.

Here's a link to the webpage of the house I lived in during my undergraduate days. They're going to be tearing the place down over the next year or so for renovations. At any rate, Fleming Hovse still kicks my ass!
For those of you who don't believe all my stories about Caltech and would like to get an idea of what it was really like, check out Crippling Depression.