Personal

Who I am

"Integrating information" is the thread that runs through what I have studied, from French literature to computer science and physics, and through each path I can imagine for myself. Researchers extract information from nature; industry understands the world through data; teachers pass on knowledge that has been put in order. I would be glad to do any of them well. The book that has shaped how I handle information most is Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren's How to Read a Book: a book about reading books, a "metabook" if you like, and my bible of information management.

Astrophysics suits me for the same reason: physics looks for the simplest description, and astronomy has the most complex objects. What draws me most is the method, using numerical computation to make theoretical predictions, more than any particular object.

The person I want to become is both romantic and realistic, an idea inspired by Don Quixote. To me, real romance is not attaching beautiful things to oneself but giving imagined beautiful things to the world. Romance without reality is only fantasy, and reality without romance is gray.

My path

I studied French language and literature at Nanjing University. A summer as a visiting student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2019 led to my first research paper, on galaxy clusters in simulations. I then spent a year on computer science at Nanjing before my PhD in physics at The Ohio State University, which took me from red giant stars to the Roman Space Telescope. I am now at the University of Michigan.

Along the way, I have come to care most about building bridges: the computational kind, between theory and data, and the human kind, between people and science.

How I work

Since my second year of college, I have tracked how I spend my time. Each entry records what kind of activity it was, how long it took, what I did and how efficiently. Every day starts from a template, with the day's plan and a short list of daily goals, and I adjust the template as I learn what works: I look back at the end of each day, each week, every month or two, and each year. I think of the template as navigation, but in time rather than space.

I keep notes on almost every part of my research, which I call work logs, and I have started to build LSAP, a literature management system that will keep my notes on every paper I read or plan to read (see Working with AI). Writing things down lets me talk across time, with other people and with my past and future selves.

Languages

Chinese is my native language. I work in English, and I studied French. In each of them, I care about using words precisely.

My name in Chinese is 曹开力, written in pinyin as Cáo Kāilì. As is usual in Chinese, the family name comes first: Cao (曹) is my family name, and Kaili (开力) is my given name, which I put first in English. Cao sounds roughly like "tsow" (rhyming with "now"), and Kaili like "kye-lee."

Outside work

I read widely: textbooks, nonfiction and fiction, newsletters and articles. I learn from online courses, documentaries and explanatory videos, and I enjoy movies, TV series, music and video games. Much of what I know came from the people who made them, and I am grateful to them.