The date is set.

January 18th. 10 AM. Judgment day.

The judges?

Professors Thomas J.R. Hughes (my advisor), Ivo Babuŝka, Leszek Demkowicz, Robert Moser, Omar Ghattas, and Yuri Bazilevs.

And whose fate, do you ask, are they judging?

Mine.

That's right. I have a date and time set for my PhD proposal. Cross your fingers and say a little prayer for me. If you are interested in what I will be proposing, a draft of my abstract is available here.

In other research news, I have just submitted to a journal a paper that I have been working with my advisor and Professors Franco Brezzi and Donatella Marini from Pavia, Italy.

Be forewarned - I am about to get technical.

The paper proposes a new theory for the modeling of plates and a simple yet effective plate finite element employing one-point quadrature. We obtained convergence results without adhering to any ad hoc stabilization tricks, and we believe these are the first such results for a one-point quadrature plate element. Needless to say, we are all quite excited about it.

And yet I am excited about this paper for an entirely different reason. Why, do you ask? Because I am now co-authors with both Babuŝka and Brezzi of the famous Babuŝka-Brezzi condition, a key result in numerical analysis of partial differential equations. I feel like I am now allowed to honarably retire (at least from the field of finite element analysis).

Yes, I am a giant nerd.