It's Hannah Park-Kaufmann

Austro-Korean, 24, she/her

Research

Here's my research CV!

Currently my top research interest

I am interested in understanding the deeper nature of pianistic by analysing pianists' movements through as objective and scientifically sound a means as possible. Exploring what underlies prowess and movement efficiency, visual elegance of movement, health of playing-style, and how they are and are not connected is a pursuit that I find fascinating. Perhaps I have also recently become more curious about exploring the connection of brain and body. You can see my TEDx talk here: youtube.com/watch?v=CRaedpagllk

Is it possible to determine health-of-playing from a small and simple set of physiological traits and patterns? A set of "eigenmoves" as it were?
What are essential physiological laws and/or constraints of 'good' piano playing?
How does a pianist's movement depend on their physical characteristics (e.g. size, sex, age)?
How does mental imagery alter a pianist's playing?
How do you relate the unique traits of a pianist's movement, the sound-vision they carry, and the sound-quality and interpretation they produce?

Some things I've recently worked on

The following are two of the projects from my last three summer REUs (Research Experience for Undergraduates). I'll put my other research projects here when I get around to editing this page again.

Data Assimilation for Geophysics Models

Sea level rise caused by climate change plays a significant part in the impact on the severity of hurricane storm surges. To better model sea-level rise, my collaborators Emily, Logan and I turn to glacier modeling, specifically marineterminating glaciers. (These have a natural flow towards the ocean, which contributes to sea level rise.)

We worked with a two-stage ice sheet model, and found that statistical data assimilation methods like the ensemble kalman filter improve model runs initialized with incorrect initial conditions/parameters. In exploring some questions that glacier scientists told us they would find useful if we could answer, we determined the necessary number of observations to produce an accurate model run, and that having few data points (how few?) in the pre-satellite era can be corrected with modern observation data.
Here's our paper.

Minimal Presentation Sizes of Numerical Semigroups

My collaborators Ceyhun, Melin and I examined the attainable minimal presentation sizes of numerical semigroups with fixed multiplicity, which has been a long-standing open problem in the field, with the exciting new methods from a paper of our mentor's, Prof. Chris O'Neill, that reveal the rich geometric structure of numerical semigroups. Numerical semigroups have a lot of interesting structure, like their bijection with the positive integer points of the Kunz polyhedron and many other curious combinatorial properties! Our paper is trudging through review at the moment; here it is on arxiv, and here's the poster we presented at the Joint Mathematics Meetings 2022.

A Few Fun Facts

Things I Like To Do

... because I find them stimulating, playful, satisfying, magnificently beautiful, thought-provoking, pleasingly meaningful, calming.... and various nice combinations of the above

Feel at peace whenever I play Schumann
Use code for creative projects

Read classical german, french, english and russian literature
Make cross-over music projects together with other people

Learn new and awesome things, constantly! :)
Run, ski, and go on hiking adventures with friends

Eat good food, especially cheese and ice-cream
Read obscure old math books I pick up from dusty corners of the math lounge and understand ~3%

Music & Mathematics and the World