About us

I am an applied mathematician who held a research position at MIT Lincoln Laboratory until retirement in 2020. As lead investigator of a team of physicists and mathematicians at MIT, I spearheaded development of an atmospheric lidar propagation model accounting for scattering, refraction, and object response. This technology enabled 3D mapping of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria to locate and assess damage, expediting recovery efforts. As part of the disaster relief program, I made three trips to assist FEMA on-site with model implementation, and co-authored the paper “To Expedite Roadway Identification and Damage Assessment in LiDAR 3D Imagery for Disaster Relief Public Assistance.”

Jan De Wilde and I started the Wild Peaches blog in 2020 to promote interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) activities. Wild Peaches posts are an eclectic mix of “Mind-sized STEM ideas and experiments, beyond the textbook”, allowing anyone to reproduce, collaborate and extend the concepts. Some examples of projects are:

• How Deep Is That Pool? - The Mathematics of COVID-19 Testing
• Yacht Design with Mathematics - A Letcher in Homotopies
• California Tumbles Into The Sea - Disaster at Rat Creek. A 3D reconstruction of the Pacific Coast Highway washout from drone video.
• Remembrance of Things Just A Moment Ago - In Search Of Time Lost Playing This Game
• Processing Piet - Language into Art, Art into Language. Creating art with computers.
• The First Day of Summer Every Day - Lazy Days with Astronomy. Locating the subsolar point for each day of the year.

The goal of the open-source project eurAIka is to help researchers everywhere spend more time making discoveries through AI assisted literature search and coding. We like to think about many different STEM related concepts and this often leads to writing code in special purpose software. With the introduction of large language models we saw the opportunity to quickly assess current literature on topics covered in Wild Peaches, and to overcome the bottleneck of learning new software. eurAIka was begun in late 2023 with the goal to helping us with every step of the scientific inquiry process.

eurAIka is built on the open-source note taking app Obsidian giving you the ability to fully customize the interface with built-in, community written or your own custom plugins. Our goal with eurAIka is to provide scientists everywhere with an easy to use platform with capabilities that only AI tools can contribute.

John Peach

January 2024.

© eurAIka sciences 2024