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Thesis

My Thesis was completed in 1986.  The title was Algorithms in Lie groups and supergroups.   It revolved around a quite esoteric aspect of Particle Physics; Group Theory as applied to the pantheon of subatomic particles.   SCHUR was written in Pascal.  Originally Microsoft Pascal, but converted to Borland's Turbo Pascal.   In fact, it seemed to be mostly about Computing.  Programming was where my life seemed to be heading, I was becoming more and more interested in it and I realised that I was unlikely to find real employment as a Theoretical Physicist outside Academia, and I'd had enough of that.

My thesis entailed enhancing a large program called SCHUR, named after the Issai Schur (1875-1941).  SCHUR provided a computational environment where the entities being manipulated were partitions.  The partitions on N is the list of ways N items can be grouped.   For example, three items can be partitioned as {1, 1, 1}, {2, 1} and {3}.   SCHUR actually manipulated lists of weighted partitions, like 

{4, 1} + 3{3, 2} - 2{2, 1, 1}
and defined a number of operators on these lists.  As well as simple addition and subtraction, I recall there were also inner and outer products and the delightful plethysm.   I spent a reasonably happy year puttering around within SCHUR adding a number of features (like that damn plethysm operator, which I recall as being horribly complex).   SCHUR was (and is still?) a tool for theoretical Physicists in the same way that I imagine MatLab or Mathematica are.

The main thing is, it got me a degree and a career,