Completed annual review

The customary silence of the PhD diary will not have worried many people so we'll just pretend that it didn't happen and move on.

The annual report was completed some time ago now and has been accepted by all the people it needed to be. I was pleased with the result, which included a detailed introduction to the area of symmetry methods and in particular the use of symmetry methods in the solution of initial- and boundary-value problems. I will post the literature review over the coming days in a series of posts that will hopefully be of interest to the inclined reader. (It will also be available as a pdf file in time, as will the annual review as a whole.)

As a part of the whole, the annual review is designed — what with the changes within the department — to form a part of the thesis. The document that I handed in will, after a discussion with my supervisor, be condensed into a paper, subject to some alterations and some additions that I am currently working on (and more on which in a short while). Thus, far from being only something that is required of me from a departmental point of view, the annual report has been a useful target that will result in roughly 20% of my thesis and the basic foundation of a paper.

The major omission of the report was examples demonstrating how the technique proposed within the report works. This has formed the thrust of my work for the last two weeks and I am pleased to say that I have been able to find one or two excellent examples that demonstrate the technique perfectly.

Thoughts on the process of writing the annual report will follow the literature review which shall be serialised over the next week.