WOLFRAM

Wolfram Summer School

Alumni

Mantas Pastolis

Science and Technology

Class of 2017

Bio

Mantas sometimes feels/feels like:

  • Funny
  • Adventurous
  • Curious
  • Certain
  • Uncertain
  • Exploring
  • Asking
  • Learning
  • Running for no reason
  • Stopping walking for no reason

Before finishing high school, Mantas decided that he wants to travel, so he packed his backpack and flew from his hometown in Lithuania to study in Israel. Now he has just finished his first year of a BSc natural sciences course at University College London, where he studies physics and chemistry. He likes it. A lot.

In the future, Mantas plans to work in environmental science—in renewable energy or air pollution. However, he is still at the stage where he is not completely sure about his future, and leaves destiny to sort out the rest.

Apart from studying, he organized a new science society at his university for the next year, which is going to cover the majority of STEM subjects, allowing undergraduates to look at science in a more interdisciplinary way. He also does mixed martial arts, plays guitar and loves hiking, whether it is in the Negev Desert or in Regent’s Park in central London.

Computational Essay

Lennard–Jones Potential »

Project: Temperature Dependance on the Amount of CO2

Goal of the project:

To find how amounts of CO2 can influence the local temperature. The local amounts of CO2 in some places (especially urban ones) can be consistently higher than in others. Although the weather is very dynamic and inconsistent, it is interesting to see if there is any correlation between the temperature and amounts of CO2 locally, i.e. the heat might get trapped and increase the temperature.

Summary of work:

The work can be divided into a few steps:

  1. Retrieving data from OCO-2 NASA satellite, which measures the amount of CO2 globally.
  2. Retrieving weather data from the Wolfram Data Repository (for example, temperature data from weather stations dating back to the 1950s was retrieved and plotted).

Results and future work:

Only a small amount (66) of reliable weather stations date back to 1950s. There was no increase in average temperature observed overall; however, this is obviously a very small sample, and it is thus very hard to predict any reliable results.