A First Author Paper
I thought I’d take a few minutes to celebrate the fact that the first first-author paper by my PhD student here at the University of Sussex, Mateja Gosenca, has just hit the arXiv. The abstract reads:
We explore the dynamical behaviour of cosmological models involving a scalar field (with an exponential potential and a canonical kinetic term) and a matter fluid with spatial curvature included in the equations of motion. Using appropriately defined parameters to describe the evolution of the scalar field energy in this situation, we find that there are two extra fixed points that are not present in the case without curvature. We also analyse the evolution of the effective equation-of-state parameter for different initial values of the curvature.
There has been a lot of interest recently in treating cosmological models as dynamical systems, and the class of models we studied has been analysed before (see the references in the paper) but this paper addresses them in a different (and perhaps slightly more elegant) way and in the context of quintessence models for dark energy. It also contains some very pretty multi-dimensional phase portraits, like this:
Of course these figures are self-explanatory, so I’ll say no more about them…
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In the Dark 
February 16, 2015 at 8:04 pm
First solo flight, congratulations!
But who is “we” in the abstract?
February 16, 2015 at 8:11 pm
I’m the second author….. so it’s the Royal We.
February 16, 2015 at 8:53 pm
Senior moment, I took “first author” to mean “single author”. So no need to promote the cat to co-author like Hetherington did.
February 16, 2015 at 8:57 pm
Actually my first paper was a single-author affair. I was so surprised that my supervisor didn’t add his name that I assumed it wad because he didn’t want to be associated with such rubbish. In fact, it was just a generous gesture.
February 16, 2015 at 9:34 pm
Yes he worked regular hours on campus. He worked very efficiently, though, especially writing. Very few rewrites, in particular.
February 17, 2015 at 4:07 pm
“Yes he worked regular hours on campus. He worked very efficiently, though, especially writing. Very few rewrites, in particular.”
Something that sadly never rubbed off on me — I still find I have to do multiple revisions before I’m happy with what I’ve written.
I seem to recall an interview in which he said that, when writing a book, he set himself a word target each evening of the week, and wrote until he met that target.
I was, and still am, in awe of John’s notebooks. There was a great deal of information in them, his calculations, notes on papers he had read, general thoughts, ideas etc. I wonder if he still works in that way.