Earlier Highlights (3)

In December 2002, Simon Portegies Zwart and I organized the workshop MODEST-2, in Amsterdam, Holland. This was the second in a series of workshops to discuss MOdeling DEnse STellar systems.


In October 2002, we held the first board meeting of our new B612 Foundation in Houston, TX. Our stated goal is to significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid in a controlled manner by 2015.


Also in October 2002, we published some early results of the first direct N-body simulation of a full globular cluster history that contained more than 100,000 stars. We also showed that there is no need to invoke a central black hole in M15, a conclusion reached independently by Gerssen et al. and Dull et al.


<- In August 2002, I taught part of the fifth annual Kira Summer School & Conference on Ways of Knowing. I also gave a talk, titled Ways of Knowing: How Many Islands?


In July 2002, I became Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies; see the program of interdisciplinary studies, listed at the home page of the Institute for Advanced Study under special programs.


Also in July, I edited the efforts of ten co-authors to produce a summary paper for our MODEST-1 workshop, available on the web as astro-ph/0207318.


<- In June, 2002, I organized a workshop on the topic Integrating Stellar Evolution and Stellar Dynamics, together with Mike Shara, chair of the astrophysics department of the American Museum of Natural History. During the workshop, we retitled the meeting as MODEST-1, for MOdeling DEnse STellar systems. Follow-up meetings will be held on a biannual basis: MODEST-2 in Amsterdam, Holland, in December 2002, and MODEST-3 in Australia, in July 2003. For more information, see the MODEST web site.


In April, 2002, a National Virtual Observatory Science Working Group was started, of which I am a member.


In March, 2002, Jun Makino and I made available a simple stand-alone version of an N-body code based on the Hermite algorithm, which will appear in the first volume of our book series Pure Gravity (see below).


<- In January, 2002, Douglas Heggie and I completed the manuscript for our book The Gravitational Million-Body Problem, to be published by Cambridge University Press, later this year. Here are previews of the preface, and the astrophysics, the theoretical physics, the computational physics, and the mathematics introductions.


Also in January, Jun Makino and I started working on the manuscript for another book, which will be the first volume in a series titled Pure Gravity: Particles at Play.