Mike Wilensky

About Me

Hi! I’m Mike Wilensky. Welcome to my home page! I am a radio astronomer working at McGill University under a CITA National Fellowship, mostly focused on 21-cm cosmology. I’m really into data analysis; it’s so cool that we can make instruments that tell us about the world in ways we could never sense on our own. What’s more is it all seems to cohere logically! That might say more about our ability to identify logical coherence than our ability to make something logical…At any rate, lately I’ve been really into Bayesian inference i.e. “probability as logic” and applying it to actual data sets. I also really enjoy resistance training, cooking tasty food, hiking, camping, video games, and just sitting around, having a laugh.

Research Interests

• Bayesian Inference: Probability as logic. See a textbook by E.T. Jaynes.
• Cosmology: What is the structure of the universe on large scales and over vast times?

News

• {September 2024} Submitted a new paper about potential large calibration errors in the widely used Haslam map.

• {July 2024} I started my CITA National Fellowship at McGill this month! I’m really excited to build some collaborations with folks here.

• {March 2024} Our research group at Manchester submitted several papers to journals along with a synchronized arxiv submission.

• {February 2024} Accepted the CITA National Fellowship to go to McGill University! Looking forward to starting this summer.

• {October 2023} New paper published! This one is a power specturm upper limit with the MWA. We found lots of faint RFI in our data, and the community will have to think about the implications.

• {July 2023} I won an award! Best talk at the MWA 10 year anniversary project meeting.

Selected Publications

Services

Journal Reviewers

• The Astrophysical Journal

Notes and Memos

Sometimes I get curious and feel like solving a toy problem or answering a basic question to develop intuition. Here is a list:

• A note on circulant matrices and their eigenmodes
• A note on the eigenspectrum of complex covariance matrices and their real representations
• A short note on Complex Gaussian random variables
• A note on Gaussian linear models
• A note on Bayesian mean estimation
• Notes on the Hypoexponential distribution
• A note on the derivative of a matrix determinant
• A note on singular value decomposition
• A note on different notions of correlation

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