About

Hi, I’m Dr Ryan Pepper. I work as a software engineer in Nottingham, UK. I’m interested in music, play guitar in a band, and follow Nottingham Forest.

I currently work as a software engineer at Siemens on the Senseye Predictive Maintenance software platform for diagnosing problems with factory machinery. Previously I lead a software team at Onyx Insight (BP Launchpad), where I worked on wind turbine asset management and predictive maintenance software. Prior to this, I have worked at the University of Birmingham as a Senior Research Software Engineer, and at Siemens where I worked on a computational fluid dynamics and thermal modelling software package for the EDA industry. I have a passion for working on software in the Engineering industry where there are real practical impacts from the solutions.

Education

I hold an MSci degree in Theoretical Physics from the University of Birmingham, and I subsequently completed my PhD under Prof Hans Fangohr at the University of Southampton, where I was part of the CDT in Next Generation Computational Modelling. My research primarily looked into computational methods for studying magnetic nanostructures, and quasiparticles that formed within these under the competition between different energy terms in the classical model of Micromagnetism. My thesis is available here. As part of this, I contributed to several open source simulation packages, most notably Fidimag and Fmmgen.

Through my academic publications, I found through Richard Boardman’s blog a finite Erdős number of 6:

  • Pepper, R.A., Beg, M., Cortés-Ortuño, D., Kluver, T., Bisotti, M-A., Carey, R., Vousden, M., Albert, M., Wang, W., Hovorka, O., Fangohr, H., (2018). Skyrmion states in thin confined polygonal nanostructures. Journal of Applied Physics 123, 093903
  • Boardman, R.P., Fangohr, H., Cox, S.J., Goncharov, A.V., Zhukov, A.A. and de Groot, P.A.J., (2004). Micromagnetic simulation of ferromagnetic part-spherical particles. Journal of applied physics, 95(11), 7037-39
  • Blott, B.H., Cox, S.J., Daniell, G.J., Caton, M.J., Nicole, D.A., (2000). High fidelity imaging and high performance computing in nonlinear EIT. Physiological Measurement. 21 (1), 7-13.
  • D.A. Nicole, E.K. Lloyd and J.S. Ward, Transputer link reconfiguration : switching networks for 4-valent graphs, IEE Proc 137 (1990) 239-244.
  • Norman L. Biggs, E. K. Lloyd and Robin J.Wilson, Graph theory: 1736-1936, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1976.
  • P. Erdős and Robin J. Wilson, On the chromatic index of almost all graphs, J. Combinatorial Theory B23 (1977), 255-257.

More recently, I’ve found I have managed to lower this to 4:

  • Pepper, R. A., Beg, M., Cortés-Ortuño, D., Kluyver, T., Bisotti, M.-A., Carey, R., Vousden, M., Albert, M., Wang, W., Hovorka, O., & Fangohr, H. (2018). Skyrmion states in thin confined polygonal nanostructures. In Journal of Applied Physics (Vol. 123, Issue 9). AIP Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5022567
  • Kluyver, T., Ragan-Kelley, B., Pérez, F. Granger, B., Bussonnier, M., Frederic, J., Kelley, K., Hamrick, J., Grout, J., Corlay, S., Ivanov, P., Avila, D., Abdalla, S., Willing, C., (2016) Jupyter Notebooks – a publishing format for reproducible computational workflows, Positioning and Power in Academic Publishing: Players, Agents and Agendas https://doi.org/10.3233/978-1-61499-649-1-87
  • Butler, S., Grout, J. (2011). A Construction of Cospectral Graphs for the Normalized Laplacian. In The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics (Vol. 18, Issue 1). The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics. https://doi.org/10.37236/718
  • Butler, S., Erdős, P., Graham, R., (2015) Egyptian Fractions with Each Denominator Having Three Distinct Prime Divisors. Integers 15. http://math.colgate.edu/~integers/vol15.html

Interestingly, the last was published 21 years after Erdős died, so I am in two minds as to whether it counts!