Oliver Knill's Homepage

Office webcamera Contact Oliver Knill Harvard University Department of Mathematics One Oxford Street Cambridge, MA 02138, USA Office: 434 ( Web camera) Tel: (617) 495 5549 Email: knill@math.harvard.edu	Mathematics My mathematical interests are in mathematical physics and dynamical systems theory, primarily in spectral questions related to dynamical systems theory. Here is a publication list, here are some preprints or handouts to talks. Websites I built and maintain the websites dynamical-systems.org and mathematik.com, (as well asrheinfall.com, rhetorik.ch and knill.com for my parents business).
Teaching Multivariable calculus, Math 21a (Fall 2000) (See more surfaces rendered with Povray 3.0).
Vita I grew up in Uhwiesen near the rheinfalls in Switzerland. After a matura of humanistic Type A (classical language latin) at the Kantonsschule in Schaffhausen, I made a Diploma (BA degree) in Mathematics at the ETH Zürich. The diploma theses "On a linked twist map in the Stoermer problem" was advised by J. Moser. I made my military duties in the Swiss army as a M109 tank driver in the artillery and in the cryptology group. During a postgraduate visit at Technion in Haifa with a Uscher-Wolf fellowship I met my wife Ruth. My theses at the ETH Zürich (born about at the same time as our son Ben) had the title "Spectral, ergodic and cohomological problems in dynamical systems" and was advised by O. Lanford III . After three years in Pasadena at Caltech as a Taussky-Todd instructor, and one year at the University of Arizona in Tucson as a Hanno-Rund visiting assistant professor, I was a Swiss National Science foundation fellow at the University of Texas in Austin. I prolonged my stay at UT for one more year as a Research Eng./Sci. assistant at the Institute for Fusion Studies before coming to Harvard as a Preceptor in the Mathematics department.
Piano As the word improvisation suggest, a theme is played without having it written down or having memorized the music. A consequence is that it could not be played the same way a second time. The underlying building blocks are a set of harmony sequences, a set of rythms usually forced by the technique chosen for the left hand, and of course - the mood. Hard and Software: The hardware and some of the software are horribly outdated: the piano is a 14 year old Korg electronic piano which we carried from Zürich Pasadena, Tucson, Austin to Boston. Consequently the piano starts to fall apart, its keys start to get outweared. The tunes are recorded on the Musicshop Midi sequencer (1981) on Macintosh. Except 01-1999.mp3, which is played once over an older improvisation, the examples are one-track recordings. Accustic recording was done with the software "Adobe Premiere" from a small external microphone. Most of the background noise origins from the harddrives and fans of 6 computers humming in the same room. The microphone is a standard input Macintosh mic. Under Linux, the aiff-to-wave conversion is done using sox and and the wave-to-mp3 conversion was done with lame. Some tests 00-nov-2000.mp3 03-nov-2000.mp3 04-nov-2000.mp3 06-nov-2000.mp3 02-nov-2000.mp3 11-nov-2000.mp3 01-1999.mp3 03-1999.mp3