I like finding simple ways to explain complicated stuff. I list some of my outreach and teaching activities below.

Chunky exposition

• The Penrose singularity theorem (2020). An introduction to general relativity and singularities for high school students. I also wrote some problems and a short lay summary to go with it.
• Why is a soap bubble like a railway? (2020). Who said you couldn’t minimise without calculus? A low-tech introduction to network planning and soap bubbles. Along the way, I also touch on complexity theory, physics, curvature, tessellations, time travel and climate change. (Ok, I’m sort of joking about the last two.)
• A hacker’s guide to the Chandrasekhar limit (2020, blog post). A rough guide to how big a white dwarf (or a box of electrons) can get before it turns into a black hole.
• Hacking physics from the back of a napkin (2020, blog post) and slides [1, 2, 3]. A paean to the processing power of the napkin. Applications include clouds, urban power usage, bacterial genomics, running in the rain, asteroids, and molecular motion.
• The Scrubland Manifesto (2019, blog post). A manifesto controversially asserting that high school math should be fun, useful and engaging. Examples included.
• Dimensional analysis and black holes (2019). An in-depth introduction to dimensional analysis, fundamental constants, and black hole thermodynamics.

Outreach

I presented at the inaugural Teen Nerd Nite, a spinoff of Nerd Nite North Vancouver, and am involved in the COVID-friendly online version. Presentations:

• A day in the life of a theoretical physicist (2020). A brief video about my path to physics and what a day in the life of a theorist looks like.
• Black holes and the information paradox (2020). What happens if you drop your homework into a black hole? We experiment using bits and buckets.

The UBC Physics Circle is an outreach program for high school students in the Vancouver area. I was a volunteer in 2018 and coordinated from 2019–20. Here are a few of the things I got up to:

• Physics Circle: problems and solutions (2018–19). A medley of problems on everything from string theory to Starbucks.
• Assorted scrappy notes (2019–20). Unpolished notes on various topics.
  • Fermi estimates: from Harry Potter to ET. How to estimate just about anything!
  • Black hole mergers. Colliding black holes and gravitational waves.
  • Searching for aliens. Fast radio bursts and extraterrestrials.

Teaching and course development

• An introduction to quantum computing (2020, University of British Columbia). Various assignments for a graduate course which is in the works.
• Physical systems (2016, University of Melbourne). I created tutorials on classical mechanics and Fourier analysis for a second-year honours course in physics, and wrote assignments on higher-dimensional donuts and surfing.