Foreword#

Hello! This is my student blog for the 2024-2025 ULB class “How To Make (almost) Any Experiments Using Digital Fabrication”.

About me#

Hi! I am Altay Oralarkaya, and the other living being in the picture is my dad’s dog, Cajou. I am pursuing a master’s degree in physics at ULB. I chose this course because I want to apply my knowledge to something practical and hands-on.

My background#

I was born in Brussels and completed my entire schooling there. I am passionate about unintuitive physics phenomena, philosophy, neuroscience, political science, sociology, and psychology.

Previous work#

Here are the projects I have completed during my bachelor’s and master’s degrees!

Research internship : Modelisation of particle trajectories around black hole#

I completed an internship in the Mathematical Physics department, where they study black holes. The project involved modeling the trajectories of material particles around a Schwarzschild black hole using Python.

I took the gravitation course during my master’s, so this internship was a great opportunity to apply my knowledge. I have always been fascinated by black holes because of the intriguing phenomena that occur around them.

Research internship : Stability analysis of a oceanic loop model circulation#

During my master’s, I had the opportunity to do an internship at the Royal Meteorological Institute of Brussels. My goal was to study the stability of the Sevellec-Fedorov model, an ocean circulation model of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). Here is the integration of the model in phase space.

Class project : 3D video game#

In my master’s program, we could choose a course outside the physics department. Since I have always been fascinated by video game development, I took this opportunity to enroll in the Virtual Reality course offered in the Polytechnique master’s program. The project for this course involved creating an interactive 3D game using the OpenGL library.

Here is a screenshot of the final result of the game I developed with my partner, Jonas Grimaud.

We are very proud of this one !