My picture is selected for the February JOM cover

Here is the story of how one of my pictures became the February cover of JOM: The Member Journal of TMS. In July 2014, I posted “Can you teach statistics in a better way?” which had some pictures generated using a small Mathematica script. As I have been working on fracture stochastics for some time, I knew that it is not easy to teach statistics or statistical fracture mechanics. As a result, I was trying to find an appealing way to teach these topics. Instead of mathematical descriptions or common PDF/CDF graphs, I generated point clouds using statistical distributions such as Gaussian, Gumbel, Frechet, and my favorite Weibull distribution in 2D. Here is my older lecture on Weibull statistics, new one will have point clouds. The pictures showed the effects of distribution parameters and looked interesting. Meanwhile, JOM was looking for members to highlight, that is how I got in contact with the contributing editor Lynne Robinson. I sent some of my symmetric pictures together with the point clouds and she made an article about my art and research. Lynne Robinson, the contributing editor, is very kind and easy to work with. I thank her for the whole process. Then, they selected the point cloud picture as the February JOM cover, end of story. I will post the actual article when it is available online. Mathematica is one of my main research tools, you can check my self-learning tool for Weibull statistics published as a part of the Wolfram demonstrations project. And, here is my Acta Materiala article on the “Deviations from Weibull statistics in brittle porous materials.”  

Posted 25th January 2015 by Ozgur Keles