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\begin{document}
\title{VIGRE Report Part II $\cdot$ Spring 2010}
\author{John Kerl}
\date{\today}
%\date{November 4, 2009}
\maketitle

The period of support (spring 2010) completed the fifth and final year of my
PhD program in mathematics at the University of Arizona.  My activities were as
follows.

Principally, I completed my doctoral research.  With all high-performance
computing runs complete, I updated, with smaller error bars, experimental
determination of critical temperature $T_c$ as a function of $\alpha$.  This
had been more crudely computed near the end of the fall semester.  I then used
the estimated critical exponents for $\bbE[\ellmax]/N$ and $f_I$ to test the
hypothesis that the GRU quotient $\bbE[\ellmax]/N f_I$ is constant in $T$ for
$T<T_c$.  (Off-lattice computations, as well as use of non-Ewens cycle weights,
are a postdoctoral research topic.) I finished several chapters of my
dissertation which had been incomplete.  I defended my dissertation March 22,
and completed revisions on April 10.

I submitted a condensed version of my dissertation to the Journal of
Statistical Physics in December, in time for job applications.  In early March,
the paper was accepted with revisions.  I submitted those revisions after my
defense; the paper is now in publication.

I recently spoke with Jan Wehr about publishing percolation results
described in my summer/fall 2009 proposal.  I intend to finish this work this
summer; I did not complete this task in time for the end of VIGRE support.

I continued to work with Tom Kennedy's bridge group.  My contributions were (in
my opinion) quite small.  (1) I did some ad hoc software mentoring with various
members of the group.  (2) I wrote a few shell scripts which enabled Tom
Kennedy's SAW-pivot code (as customized by members of the group) to run in the
background on a compute server.  (3) I wrote a program to exhaustively count,
using a backtracking algorithm, location-constrainted self-avoiding walks of
length $N$ in the plane, for $N$ up to 20 or so.  This was intended to
complement Tom's software which examined location-constratined self-avoiding
walks of much longer lengths, using sampling methods.  I found that the
achievable walk lengths were too small to confirm Tom's results.

Along with Tom Kennedy, I co-organized the weekly mathematical physics
seminar.

I gave a talk on my dissertation research at the AMS/MAA Joint Meetings in San
Francisco in January.  Of course, my primary purpose for attending this year's
meetings was the job search; I had three interviews there, two of which led to
offers of on-site interviews.

I also attended the 23rd Annual Workshop on Recent Developments in Computer
Simulation Studies in Condensed Matter Physics at the end of February at the
University of Georgia. I gave a contributed talk on the worm-algorithm portion
of my dissertation.  I made several professional contacts.  As well, I obtained
advice on the worm algorithm's stopping-time problem --- alas, too late to
implement for my dissertation research.

Spring job-seeking efforts included attendance at the Joint Meetings, several
on-site interviews, and one job offer, which I accepted.  Academic employers
were not interested in me; one acknowledges that it is a tight job market this
year.  A mathematical-consulting defense contractor, who recruited me at the
Joint Meetings, as well as three financial firms I applied to, brought me
on-site for interviews.  One of the latter made me an offer, which I accepted.
I will be working as a quantitative software developer in New York, starting in
mid-June.

VIGRE support was particularly helpful in permitting me to focus on the job
search.  I extend my appreciation to the VIGRE committee.

\end{document}
