25 Years

With the start of October the new academic year has started, and it brings with it the start of my 26th year at the University of Surrey.  I started here 25 years ago.  In some ways it doesn't feel like very long, but if I look back to those days when I started, they seem sufficiently shrouded in the veils of memory to count as a long time ago.  

I suppose these days it is getting increasingly unusual to be at one employer for so long, and 25 years at one place is quite unusual.  Certainly the place has changes quite a bit over those years - not surprising for a University which is only now about 60 years old.  If things carry on as they are, I should still be expecting to work there around my 40 year anniversary (!), but expecting soon to retire at that point. 

I haven't received anything congratualing me on my long service or offering me a carriage clock.  Usually it gets flagged somewhere eventually and I get a belated letter.  I might have to casually drop some hints in the right place this time. 

EuNPC in Caen

 

I am at day 5 of 5 at the European Nuclear Physics Conference in Caen, France.   It's the first time I've been at one of the conferences in this series, and I've enjoyed the broad range of talks, attending not only the sessions very close to my own activity, but also those on applications and distant parts of the field.  

Caen seems like a nice enough place, though I can't say I have explored it very much.  We were driven out to something like an old tithe barn for the conference dinner, where we were treated to a covers band composed of nuclar physicists from the IJCLab in Paris.  

My talk was scheduled on Monday, so I enjoyed getting that out of the way, and the subsequent ongoing discussions about it with people as the week went on.  

I am staying on for one extra day to take part in a NuPECC meeting finishing Saturday lunchtime.

Homework is an uncountable noun

It's that time of year when my children enter a new school year.  In the case of one of them, it's a new school, too, as she enters year 7 and so secondary school.  

The school uses an app called Bromcom, named after the genre of male romantic comedy films for reasons that escape me. 

In the homework section of the app, parents and children can keep an eye on any homework assignments set.  Since we're just in the first few days of school, my daughter has not received any homework yet, and the app says "No homeworks found!"

Using homework as a countable noun grates with me.  I'm sure there's an element of me railing against new usages, but the uncountable status of homework is well-attested in dictionaries.  Here's the Cambridge dictionary's guide to countable and uncountable nouns, where they explicitly use homework as one of the examples of a uncountable noun:

Other common uncountable nouns include: accommodation, baggage, homework, knowledge, money, permission, research, traffic, travel.

These nouns are not used with a/an or numbers and are not used in the plural.

In my quick internet search, there seemed complete consensus on this from a whole range of sources.   

Oh well, here's a recent picture of me reacting to these kind of usages:

 

 

Summer projects

 It is getting near the end of the summer holidays.  Literally at the end for school kids with mine going back today and tomorrow, while university undergraduates have a couple more weeks to go before they are back in classes.  

There is no automatic summer holiday for university-based academics in the UK, though summer is, for many of us, the easiest time to take the bulk of our annual leave allowance.  It is not just research and community/admin activities that carry on in summer - there is teaching too.  In particular the standard UK MSc programme lasts for a full 12-month long year with the summer months being taken up doing a final project.  

I have been (co-)supervising  4 projects in nuclear physics and quantum computing, and I've been pleased to get two of the projects to get involved in providing some sample results for a paper for a conference proceeding that gives a summary of some methods for determining eigenstates and eigenvalues on a quantum computer.  This means that two of my MSc project students are now co-authors on a publication with me.  I'm not sure when the paper will appear in the official conference proceedings, but I've stuck it up on the University repository so that it is available to anyone to read.  May I present ... 

“Quantum Computing for Nuclear Structure”, Paul Stevenson, Chandan Sarma, Robbie Giles, Lloyd LaRonde, and Bhoomika Maheshwari, submitted to proceedings of 17^th International Conference of Nuclear Structure Properties (NSP2025), Sivas, Türkiye (2025)  

Holiday in Oberstdorf

 I am on holiday for the week in Oberstdorf, Germany.  It's a mountain resort in the very far south of the country and we are here because there is a short track speed skating summer camp which one of my kids is attending.  I am here with him, and two of my other children, trying to keep everyone entertained while doing all the training activities for my 8yo.

It's very pretty here.  The town is in a valley between mountains.  There is a cable car up to the peaks, though we have stayed down in the town where the ice rink is, as we are not really here to (or equipped to) go hiking.  

 

Another Office Move

A year and a bit ago I had to move office at the University, after about 20 years in my previous office.   I moved from 12BB03 to 02AA04 – so up a level to the 4th floor, and across buildings from BB to AA.  My new office was pretty hard to work in with a constant drone coming from the plant room of Senate House outside it.  I am unable to filter out such noises and so I spent a year finding it pretty hard to function at work.  Now, though, I have moved offices again, to 28BC04, which is back to the floor (BC04) that I first had an office in when I arrived here in 2000.  I am not, alas, on the side of BC04 where I can see any plant life from my window, but otherwise the environent in this office is much bettern than the AA04 office.  

I await bookshelves so at the moment my office looks like this:

but hopefully it will be a bit more habitable soon. 
 

Unitary as a noun

Since working in the field of quantum computing, I've had to get used to seeing the word unitary used as a noun to mean a unitary object such as an operator or matrix.   

 Such a usage has yet to make it into any English dictionary that I've checked - not OED, Chambers, Cambridge, Merriam-Webster.  Of those, only OED do list one kind of nounal usage, with the definite article, meaning "that which is unitary" with a first example quotation give as:

Man loves the Universal, the Unchangeable, the Unitary - W. E. Channing, Perfect Life (1888)

(someone writing a thesis on quantum computing, please feel free to take that quote!)

 The bible of quantum computing, Nielsen and Chuang's textbook Quantum Computation and Quantum Information sticks to standard English usage, with unitary always an adjective, but there is at least one place where I could see an unwary reader thinking it was a noun.  On p71 (10th anniversary edition) they say

This result suggests the following elegant outer product representation of any unitary U.

Here, the symbol U is the noun and unitary is an adjective, and if they wanted a nounal usage of unitary I'm sure they'd've put a comma in there. 

To show an example of the contemporary nounal usage, I was going to pick the first paper in today's arXiv quant-ph section and show how it is done, but they very diligiently use unitary only as an adjective.  In fact, I had to scan through quite a few papers from today's quant-ph to find unitary as a noun, but here is an example (from arXiv:2507.07646):

Note that the state [...] is generated by a unitary acting on the initial state 

The latent lexicographer in me would be interested to know the first example of such a usage, but I fear it would be very hard to find.