ELI alum continues UD collaboration

ELI alum Eric Darrigrand keeps a bit of Delaware with him wherever he goes. And occasionally he shares it with audiences both here and abroad.

	ELI alum Eric Darrigrand (second from left) returned to Newark this summer to attend a conference with former colleagues in the math department, Peter Monk, Fioralba Cakoni and David Colton.

Whenever the former UD postdoctoral student––now an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Rennes in France––makes a presentation at an international conference, the first thing his audience sees on his laptop computer is a crisp close-up of a monarch butterfly hanging from a Buddleia bush in a Newark backyard.

Eric counts nature photography among his passions, right up there next to algorithms and folk dancing. He took the photo at the home of Bob and May Hawthorne of Windy Hills, his homestay family two years ago when he studied at ELI. Eric visited the Hawthornes when he returned to Newark in June.

But the 29-year-old’s favorite hobby is making models. He got the blueprints to his parents’ house and taught himself how to build it to scale––one matchstick at a time. Before he’d finished, he had already taken on a new project. He convinced his former high school director to lend him the building plans for his high school in Lescar, near his hometown of Pau in southern France.

Today––eight years and 12,000 matchsticks later––the replica of the institution founded by King Henry IV in 1605 is almost done. “I like projects that don’t finish,” he said.

An ongoing project with his postdoctoral research director, Peter Monk, Unidel professor and incoming interim chair in the math department––brought him back to the United States this summer, when he traveled with Monk and former colleagues David Colton and Fioralba Cakoni to a “Waves” conference at Brown University.

It was Eric’s dissertation research at the University of Bordeaux on a topic related to one Monk was working on, plus his strong background in a form of rapid calculation called “fast multipole,” which led to his selection for the postdoctoral position in 2002.

After leaving Newark to join the faculty at the University of Rennes in 2003, Eric continued collaborating with Monk. It was the result of this joint work on radar waves that he presented at Brown. But the purpose of his visit extended beyond that conference.

“It’s very useful to have face-to-face interaction,” Monk explained. Sitting in his office in Ewing Hall, he pointed to a computer screen with a rainbow-colored bell-curve-like diagram.

“Our project involves developing a new algorithm and writing a computer code to demonstrate it,” he said, switching to a screen filled with Fortran. “We can both sit at the terminal and sort out glitches in the code.”

True to form, Eric is pleased with the continuing arrangement.

“I think we have some work for many years,” he said, smiling.