Paul's Office Tour

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	Main View From Doorway. The 590 Commonwealth Avenue Science Center was actually two buildings at one time joined together through the alley between them. It is now a five story open space that makes the building feel quite a bit airy. There is a lounge right next to my office with huge 2-story windows. I go there when I'm feeling claustrophobic from my office or leave my door open and see out. I love my office location because it's tucked away behind a glass door by itself (a nice corner office). Just that it doesn't have windows because of the location. But I chose to have this corner office as opposed to a hallway office with windows. As of August 2008, BU kindly painted and carpeted my office. I outfitted it with new lamps, area rug, and my leather sitting chair (it's very comfy). I weeded out the books in my bookshelf and got rid of the ones I never look at.
	Some Computer Visualizations. On the ledge of one of my blackboards, I put some pictures of computer visualizations I have done over the years. Left to right, are visualizations of liquid water (an interactive program for students), a representation of bonds in liquid water where the colors represent the duration of the hydrogen bonds, and a simulation of a fractal called diffusion limited aggregation where I calculated the probability of most active attachment sites (notice they tend to be on the perimeter) and traced back the history of where the active sites came from (also known as its backbone).
	More Fractals On the other side of the lamp, on the same blackboard ledge, is one representation of one of my most interesting pieces of work. This is a visualization of many random walkers. You cannot see the random walkers, but rather the color changes at specific time intervals. This led to rather interesting patterns. I imported the images into Photoshop and played with hues and other color controls. These images have appeared in magazines such as Science News, Discover, Nature, and many books. To the left of this image is a fractal pattern on plexiglass formed from wedging two pieces of glass together with paint in the middle and then pulling them apart. It created such a pattern because of a phenomena called viscous fingering: a low viscosity fluid (air) displaces high viscosity (paint). This phenomena is used to explain many patterns in nature. To the left of that is a cast of a cat heart-lung, given to me by the biology department, showing fractal patterns in physiology.
	Amy's Painting #1. This picture (and the one following) are hanging over my desk and were given to my wife and I as a wedding present in 1997 by my good friend Amy York. Sadly, Amy passed away from breast cancer a few years ago. This painting obviously represents conception, at least to me. But it may mean something different to you.
	Amy's Painting #2. This is the second of my Amy paintings. This is a little more complicated, again at least to me. Amy didn't just give me these two paintings. She asked me which were my favorite from many dozens she had in her apartment. This one spoke to me in a very specific way. To me this is mainly an expression of pain and inner turmoil. The red represents to me the stain of anger (or pain or evil) which permeates the rest of an inner landscape that is compartmentalized and separate.
	Papa's Painting. My grandfather picked up painting very late in life (around age 80 or so). I was very close to him and have very fond memories of playing golf with him in the mid 90s. I commisioned this picture from him and he painted it exactly as I envisioned (with a lot of help from his art teacher; you should have seen the original he did). This is the image that I see when I want to think of my grandfather. He passed away January 3, 2006.