2026-08-12 –, Room 5
I rebuilt my PhD ray-tracing code for higher-dimensional black objects from MATLAB to Julia, resolving numerical issues and achieving major performance gains. Julia’s language features and ecosystem let me simplify the architecture, improve performance, and achieve previously inaccessible results. I’ll show key techniques and performance tricks that made the rewrite both faster and cleaner.
During my PhD I wrote MATLAB code to trace light rays around higher-dimensional black objects. The original implementation became difficult to extend and suffered from performance bottlenecks, which prevented me from exploring more complex geometries. In recent years I completely rebuilt the code in Julia, which not only removed long-standing numerical issues but also delivered large speedups and enabled us to image a wider range of higher-dimensional objects for the first time.
I will show how the Julia ecosystem tremendously simplified the code. I will also highlight how the unique properties of the Julia language as a high level but also highly performant language allowed me to speed up the calculations by orders of magnitude.
Rather than focusing on the underlying physics, this talk tells the computational story: how rewriting in Julia made it possible to make images of never before seen higher dimensional objects.
I am interested in anything mathematics and physics both theoretical and computational.
Currently I work as a consultant in the "Mathware" department of Sioux Technologies in the Netherlands.
Previously I was a theoretical physicist studying black holes and string theory inspired black hole alternatives.