Erol Aksoy

My name is Erol Aksoy. I was born in Ordu in Turkey. I am participating in the Summer of HPC programme under project number of 2206. The project subjects the development of parallel code in Julia to simulate a transport phenomena using Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR). I will be in Paris during this period of study. In the post, I will introduce my academic and personal interests and life.

I studied in my hometown Ordu during my secondary and high school years. Later on, I entered the Department of Aeronautical Engineering at Istanbul Technical University due to my interest in physics and mathematics. From the early days of the university, the field of aerodynamics began to interest me. I already knew about the complexity and timeliness of fluid physics. For this reason, I had decided before I entered the university that I would work in the field of aerodynamics or fluid dynamics. In my first year at the university, I started to work in the field of computational aerodynamics with one of the outstanding professors of our faculty. At this point, coding entered my life. I studied computational aerodynamics for about 2 years. In this process, together with my instructor and one of his assistant, we developed and revealed an aerodynamic analysis tool for small UAVs. Later, when my professor retired, I had to work with another professor for my undergraduate thesis.

At this point, I decided to study computational fluid dynamics, which I had the opportunity to deal with at the place where I did my internship, and I chose my teacher in this direction (of course, I had to be accepted by him first.). Now I started to focus more on applied mathematics and mathematical modeling of physical phenomena. Due to the personal interest of my teacher, we were working on moving mesh problems and their solutions. We were also using adaptive mesh refinement while doing these. For my undergraduate thesis, we solved the flow around a rotor using open source software and AMR. We also had the opportunity to publish a few publications on this study.

I am currently working on CFD with the same professor at Istanbul Technical University and I am doing my master’s degree. Although my master’s thesis is just to develop an algorithm to solve moving mesh and boundary problems in the compressible flow regime using the Arbitrary-Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) method, since my teacher’s interest in different subjects and my curiosity were encouraged a lot by him, I could be involved in many topics in the field of CFD, write different codes and had the opportunity to be intoduced with some of the problems of CFD.

Personal Interests Beyond the Academy

Up to this point of my post, I have only talked about my academic life. Under this heading, I would like to talk a little bit about my personal interests. All my life I have been interested in different areas of life. For example, I played chess in my primary school years and was also interested in theology. At the same time, I started learning baglama, one of the traditional musical instruments of my country. I started swimming when I was in high school. This process even progressed to becoming a licensed swimmer. Again in high school, my interest in mathematics and physics began to emerge. Along with my interest in theology, I started to encounter the philosophical reflections of physics problems. However, at that time, I was not interested in philosophy. I just stumbled upon it. I realized this much later.

University years were also very decisive for my intellectual life. First, my interest in philosophy increased. I started studying philosophy. Engineering problems didn’t interest me anyway. Because I always loved theory, not practice. When I grasped the close relationship between mathematics and philosophy, a very different world opened up for me to recognize and learn. While all this was going on, I added another traditional musical instrument to the baglama. That was a kamancha or “kabak kemane”.

As summary, I am currently studying, reading, thinking about philosophy, mathematics and CFD. Philosophy makes me think about being and truth. Mathematics seems to be the tool of the human mind to see and grasp the truth. CFD, on the other hand, reflects my experiences with this world, which must be explained in terms of its relation to applied mathematics.

To come back to real world after a lot of information about me, this summer event organized by PRACE has the following importance for me: I will have the opportunity to develop a parallel code for the adaptive mesh refinement technique that I have known and used before. I will also have the opportunity to get to know Paris and this culture closely. I’m so excited for both of these. Let’s see what the next two months will bring…