Professor Craig Carter and his research student Rachel Zucker visited the TSM CDT from 13-15th February and gave a series of workshops on Mathematica.

Their aim was to help students "construct models, compute results and visualise them" and they did so by exploring three canonical materials physics problems: the Kronig-Penney model, stability analysis of elastic modes and energy-surface exploration.

To say that Craig and Rachel fulfilled their brief would be an understatement - they showed how Mathematica really could put the words 'simplicity','power' and 'beauty' in the same sentence. Incredibly, no time was wasted on teaching elementary syntax thanks to Craig and Rachel's excellent planning.

To get the competitive juices flowing, the TSM CDT director, Professor Peter Haynes, offered cash prizes for the best Mathematica demonstrations, below are the prize winning entries:

• Musab Khawaja's visualisation of Spinodal decomposition
  
• Vincent Chen's visualisation of the Ising Model
• Max Boleininger's visualisation of Solitons
• Fabian Renn's visualisation of Time-Varying Discrete Fourier-Transforms
• Anthony Lim's visualisation of the Tight Binding model for Graphene