Notes on research papers, often with whaley research group

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# New: See the “arXiv.wiki”

I have started to write my notes on research papers on the arXiv wiki.

For example, here are some notes on my first paper: https://arxiv.wiki/abs/2101.05513

I write these notes primarily to cement my own understanding. I often oversimplify to help me understand the main point.

If there are errors, please let me know by email.

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# November 12, 2020 (Schrödinger 1920)

This is Schrödinger’s seminal paper on “optimal colors” – colors that are extremal in some way. Schrödinger called them “maximal lightness”, but their specialness has to do with something MacAdam calls “purity” – distance from the white point in a chromaticity diagram. We also read West and Brill that relates Schrödinger’s colors to convexity. Brill does the introduction in the English version of Schrödinger’s paper.

Overall, this is what I’ve learned:

• Schrödinger colors are “on/off” colors in frequency space; at every frequency, it is either “maximum strength”, or “no strength”. Schrödinger calls them bivalent.
• Some bivalent colors are optimal, meaning they have maximum purity or difference from “white point” on the chromaticity diagram, given the visual efficiency or “percentage of the frequency space that’s on”.
• When the chromaticity diagram is convex (yes for humans, no somehow for bees), only “on/off” colors with at most 2 transitions in frequency space are optimal. For non-convex diagrams, the number of transitions in the optimal colors is not always 1 or 2.

I’m a little skeptical that bees have a non-convex chromaticity diagram (how do you even test for this?) but it was enlightening to work towards understanding these optimal colors, and read a (translation of) paper of someone I’ve heard about since high school.

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# October 29, 2020 (Kalinin et al 2020)

See the arXiv wiki: https://arxiv.wiki/abs/2008.00466

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# October 15, 2020 (Bannai et al 2020)

See the arXiv wiki: https://arxiv.wiki/abs/2009.11170

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# October 8, 2020 (Elfving et al 2020)

See the arXiv wiki: https://arxiv.wiki/abs/2009.12472

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# September 22, 2020 (Rau 2009)

See the arXiv wiki: https://arxiv.wiki/abs/0906.4716

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# September 10, 2020 (Fefferman et al 2016)

See the arXiv wiki: https://arxiv.wiki/abs/1604.01384

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# August 4, 2020 (Dong et al 2020)

See the arXiv wiki: https://arxiv.wiki/abs/2002.11649

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# July 22, 2020 (Bravyi et al 2019)

See the arXiv wiki: https://arxiv.wiki/abs/1904.01502

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# July 16, 2020 (Karanjai et al 2018)

See the arXiv wiki: https://arxiv.wiki/abs/1802.07744

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# July 9, 2020 (Kirby et al 2019-2020)

See the arXiv wiki: https://arxiv.wiki/abs/1904.02260

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# July 2, 2020 (Kirby et al 2020)

See the arXiv wiki: https://arxiv.wiki/abs/2002.05693

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# June 11, 2020 (Gilyén et al 2019)

See the arXiv wiki: https://arxiv.wiki/abs/1806.01838

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# June 4, 2020 (Sung et al 2020)

See the arXiv wiki: https://arxiv.wiki/abs/2005.11011

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# May 28, 2020 (Campbell 2019)

See the arXiv wiki: https://arxiv.wiki/abs/1811.08017

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# May 21, 2020 (Childs et al 2020)

See the arXiv wiki: https://arxiv.wiki/abs/1912.08854

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# May 14, 2020 (Huang et al 2020)

See the arXiv wiki: https://arxiv.wiki/abs/2002.08953

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# May 7, 2020 (Mann et al 2020)

See the arXiv wiki: https://arxiv.wiki/abs/2004.11568

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Do you have a paper suggestion? Was this helpful for you? Please send me an email.