Hi Tamara,

I talked to Kevin about possible ideas for extra credit on the N-Body
assignment.

He suggested that (since you might want to be a physicist) you could
talk to a real astrophysicist who actually does this for a living.
Possible things to work on:

(1) Getting the thing to work on more realistic large data sets.

(2) Working on galaxy collision models: modeling how the component
    stars in galaxies behave when their hosting galaxies run into each
    other.  I have seen animations of these models.  They are not only
    cool, but they are in fact cutting edge research.

(3) Going to 3D so you might end up building an oct-tree.

Cheers,
Randy

------- Start of forwarded message -------
From: Kevin Wayne <wayne@CS.Princeton.EDU>
Subject: Re: Precepts Mon May 3 in Friend 108
To: rywang@CS.Princeton.EDU

The astrophysicist who would know about generating data for N-body
simulations is James Stone.

   http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~jstone/gallery.html

Getting good 2d data with different colors for different galaxies,
or 3d data would certainly be very useful and interesting.

She can also learn more about N-body codes from the lectures
Jim gave in JP's class.

   http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spring04/cos590/

	-Kevin