Fraternity:

Third Degree Member of the Knights of Columbus.

(larger picture to come soon, Sorry) Children race to the finish line while cheered on by an eager group of spectators during a potato sack race. The race was one of many activities that took place during a Founder's Day picnic hosted by Father Francis Ostdiek Council 14029 in Des Moines, Iowa. (Source: Columbia Magazine, September 2007) THE KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS: IN SERVICE TO ONE. IN SERVICE TO ALL. Building a better world, one council at a time. Every day, Knights all over the world are given opportunities to make a difference. Whether it's through community service, raising money for their parish or prayer. We celebrate each and every Knight for his strength, his compassion and his dedication to building a better world. I am proud to be a Knight!

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Poem: My Favourite People Are Children

Our lLegacy to Our Children

Political Preference: I have always been on the left-centre of the Canadian poltical spectrum. My entire family have always voted Liberal, federally and provincially, although I believe that sometimes governments do what's easier and best for their own political future rather than the right thing. I am a very liberal person. I like to joke that I vote Liberal because I like the "Liberal" name. :)

I love my country Canada! Je t'aime Canada!

Oh Canada

This is a nation of culture and pride;

Freedom and trust have been true when tried.

Our land of mountains, lakes, and plains

Is rich in beauty and wondrous terrain.

Canadians, lovers of beautiful trees,

Will fly their Maple Leaf proudly, with ease.

Thankful for bountiful gifts from our land,

We're a people ready to lend a hand.

Eyes on our flag, we stand and sing;

"Oh Canada" from sea to sea will ring.

By Joan Adams Burchell

To my Flag and to the country it represents,

I pledge RESPECT and LOYALTY

Wave with PRIDE from sea to sea

and within your folds, keep us ever UNITED.

Be for all a symbol of LOVE, FREEDOM and JUSTICE

God keep our FLAG

God protect our CANADA

SALUT AU DRAPEAU CANADIEN

À mon drapeau et au pays qu'il

représente, je promets RESPECT

et FIDELITÉ

D'une mer à l'autre, flotte avec

FIERTÉ et dans tes plis garde

nous toujours UNIS.

Sois, pour nous tous, un symbole

de l'AMOUR, de la LIBERTÉ et de

la JUSTICE

Dieu garde notre DRAPEAU

Dieu protége notre CANADA

See more photos of Mr. Milbank on my biography page.):

I do love pets. If I had a dog, I would name him "Einstein", and if I had a cat I would name her "Schrödinger". When I was young I thought all dogs were males and all cats were females!

Biographical Information

(University of Western Ontario) Ph. D. Student of Collaborative Program in Theoretical Physics in the Applied Mathematics Department and just sitting in on Scientific Computing Program in the Applied Mathematics Department Granular Materials Computer Simulations (Click here for my latest paper)

Undergraduate Specialization in Physics/Applied Mathematics and Computer Science

Member of the Theoretical Physics Grad Colloquium

e-mail: jdrozd1 at uwo.ca

g-mail: john.drozd at gmail.com

Academic Interests and Links

My Curriculum Vitae

My Favourite Books

My Hobbies

A butcher once told my Dad that intelligent people follow sports. I truly believe that. Afterall, if one did not follow sports he could be dumb enough to believe that a quarterback is loose change! Sports allows one to play life. As an example from baseball, "Life throws you many curve balls. Sometimes you strike out, but then again you might hit a home run!" As an example from football, "In Life you fumble, tackle problems, recover and run with the ball, and finally you make a touchdown. You keep trying and if you get 10 yards, you're rewarded for your valiant efforts and you're back to first down, and get another four downs or chances (3 downs in Canadian football). Keeping on trying and never giving up is the key to success and football and sports in general shows that!" (When my younger sister was little and sick with the stomach flu, I used to tell her that the football game was a team fighting for her health versus a team making her sick.) I love to play life! Sports can have funny things happen as well. When I was playing basketball with my friends in gym class in Fort McMurray Composite Highschool in Alberta, somebody threw me the basketball and I panicked and whipped the basketball on a guy's head. The basketball bounced off his head and went swoosh into the basket. I'm sorry that my friend had a headache but we got 2 points. Mr. Carleton our gym teacher and all the students were rolling on the gymnasium floor laughing their guts out! My gym teacher Mr. Gray at Northern HighSchool in Sarnia had a habit of whipping the chalk eraser at us if we talked in class. I remember when we were discussing drug abuse, I made a joke of getting high on oxygen and when we were having sex education, Alan Shadforth commented what do we do when it gets all spongy and hard, and us boys all had a chuckle. :) Our math teacher Mr. Hodgins in Lakeroad public school was a gym teacher as well. On Friday afternoons he would ask us kids "What do you want to do Math? or Baseball or Flag Football?" and all us kids would naturally scream the sports choice! Once our art teacher drew a frog on his door which created a fussy fight with our French teacher. When I got my schedule mixed up and I tried to convince the shop teacher for a good 15 minutes that he was supposed to be teaching math! When I took automechanics me and my partner could not put our lawnmower engine back together especially the flywheel, so our automechanics teacher took us to this cupboard and he told us to deposit my lawnmower engine there with the rest. The teacher had a collection of about 25 lawnmowers that students could not put back together! I suspected he sold them for profit. But I had no problem memorizing the names of the engine parts for 2 stroke and 4 stroke cycle engines. Remember: "Intake, Compression, Power and Exhaust". When I was doing a boxing scene with my friend Bruce Fletcher in Mr. Yates's drama class in Sarnia in Lakeroad public school. Mr. Yates had an old volkswagon beetle that he was trying to get rid off so he kept parking it under large tree branches hoping the car would be wrecked. Anyways, Bruce was supposed to duck backwards but he went forwards and POW! I gave him a bloody nose with a right hook! Bruce was our neighbourhood newspaper boy, so I was afraid he would stop delivering newspapers to our house! Our homeroom teacher in Northern HighSchool in Sarnia advised us to stand on our heads and read our textbooks upside down. The reason being that our minds would think better with the blood rushing to our brains! My friend Robbie Peterson, who used to take me for rides on his minibike in the bush in Sarnia, used to eat two cold Big Macs in homeroom every morning! I love sports especially hockey! Watching and playing sports taught me this valuable lesson in life: Even when the chips are down, by not giving up and not losing hope, you have a chance of turning things around. I always see a glass of water half full and not half empty! Afterall a loser is someone who wins the next time he tries. I have read and heard a lot of testimonials from millionaires, and what I learned from these smart, intelligent people is that you only become very successful in life's roller coaster after you have failed, recovered and climbed your way to the top of success (many times failing more than once!). Life is like a rodeo. You get back up on the saddle and ride'em cowboy! Here's an appropriate poem I just wrote about coping with life's struggles: Tequila Bay I have had many low points and high points in my life, and I feel all people experience life this way. I escaped communism from Czechoslovakia with my parents and older sister in 1968, and was welcomed by Canada. Many friendly Canadians helped my family. Canada has beautiful natural surroundings and I was fortunate to live in Ontario as well as Northern Alberta. I have suffered depression and schizophrenia and overcome it through determination, optimism, and drive. Read my poem "The Dark Disease" which I wrote to warn and help people if they have symptoms of schizophrenia. I have a passion for life. I wrote my "Tequila Bay" poem to convey the ebb and flow of life's struggles, and to give people hope that one should never give up a life no matter how hard life becomes. No matter how bad life gets at times, if you have a positive attitude to do good and work hard, life will get better. When one door closes, later on another door opens to greener pastures. When the door closes, you don't know what lies ahead in life -- only God does and he loves you. Suffering builds strength and character and love overcomes suffering. Help others in need -- you'll have a great feeling when you help your neighbour. If everyone helped just one other person, imagine how our planet would shine! When you are feeling sad, wear bright colours to cheer yourself up. Life is too beautiful to waste. As a football coach once told his losing football team: "You should expect many peaks and valleys in life. Overcoming these valleys is how you grow in life." Here is my poem about surviving a broken heart.

FACEOFF.COM/TSN/ESPN/SPORTSNET/SCORE/NFL/CNN Sports Illustrated

Did you ever wonder how much is a million?

Well, my Sarnia Lakeroad public school Science teacher Mr. Tate had us try to figure it out while I watched him read his novel. He had us drawing circles counting to a million for 2 weeks. I call them goose eggs. I had a system that I coloured every 100th goose egg solid. I got to 300,000! Mr Tate also had us eat dandelion salad. Yuch! It was very bitter!

I had a "blast!" in my highschool chemistry class in Fort McMurray Alberta Composite Highschool. Mr. Wiebe, our chemistry highschool teacher would plant wet Nitrogen TriIodide at the back of the classroom. To keep us awake, when dried the Nitrogen TriIodide would create little explosions! Mr. Loerke also taught me chemistry there. He broke his leg once skiing so we had a 90 year old substitute male teacher. He told us "Well ... When he was learning chemistry, there were only 15 elements on the periodic table!" I knew we were in trouble then!

When I took chemistry at the University of Alberta with Professor Plambeck, the night before the exam I had hellish nightmares of titration pipettes dripping a Chinese water torture on my forehead and being attacked by titration curves! The day of the chemistry exam (it was a make-up), I was taking the bus to the University of Alberta and I decided to take a nap on the bus. The problem is that I did not wake up until the bus was back at my apartment. So I was late for the chemistry exam, and I actually did worse than I did on the original try. You see, it was multiple choice and the grading scheme was hellish: right - quarter wrong. I guess that's why I'm in physics! :-) But if you got perfect, then Professor Plambeck would present you with a crisp Canadian dollar bill in front of the whole chemistry class! On the first day of chemistry class, Mr. Plambeck said "Look to your left and look to your right. Next term, one of these people will be gone!" I remember that in my chemistry labs, the fume hood was directly behind my workstation. Once someone by accident placed the ammonia concentrate on my workstation desk instead of directly under the fume hood. I didn't know what it was in the bottle so I took a whif, and boy did I cry with tears in my eyes! (Source: http://www.CartoonStock.com)

I have attached some fun quotes about physics here in pdf format. And see for a ha ha ha physics party: click here!

Also when I was presenting a project on Thomas Edison in grade 5 at Lakeroad Public School, I had my fly undone. When I was finished my presentation, I asked if there were any questions. A girl put up her hand and asked me if I own a free hotdog stand. I didn't clue in so she explained to me that I had my fly undone. I quickly turned around, zipped up my fly, turned back and asked if there were any more questions. I also did school projects on dinosaurs, Jack Miner with his Canada goose and duck bird sanctuary, and the worm. Did you know that a worm has 5 hearts? I still have all these projects in my basement at home. Click here for a video of my basement library!

I remember my favourite math professor George Labhan when I was at the University of Alberta told us that one day a student on an exam wrote nothing but a funny story about rabbits and he gave him 30%. We all had problems doing the integral of (x-cot(3x))^2 dx from Earl W. Swokowski's textbook "Calculus With Analytic Geometry". I remember doing every integral in that book but for the life of me I could not integrate (x-cot(3x))^2 dx!! George Labhan is now a professor at the University of Waterloo and does research on the Computer Algebra Package Maple.

Dr. Greg Reid who is another Maple researcher and who taught me a fascinating graduate course on nonlinear partial differential equations was fun playing volleyball with because he would boot the ball like a soccer ball!

My favourite math teacher at Northern HighSchool in Sarnia was Mr. Vosburg (he worked construction in the summers). Mr. Vosburg taught me how to factor polynomials in a neat way that is not taught in textbooks and I love him for it! I also had Mrs. Svab a Czech Math teacher. My favourite Math teacher at Fort McMurray Composite HighSchool was Mr. Ormerod who taught me to complete the square that I had a lot of trouble with. Mr. Ormerod also was a soccer coach which I played for few times.

My favourite English teacher at Northern HighSchool was Mr. Cassidy. He taught us to write wordy but he called Jane a sexpot once and had me as the stud when he was describing a Harlequin Romance plot. On the last day of class Mr. Cassidy brought his ukulele and sang Frankie and Johnny were lovers! At Ryerson I did projects with Frank Cristini but we were not lovers!

At the University of Alberta I once had so many overdue books that I had to pay $75 in fines. I got my sisters to pay the fine. They got the mean looks from the librarian lady. I guess I shouldn't have stacked the library books to use as furniture! Did you know that W.O. Mitchell used to return his books to the library in a wheelbarrow? W.O. Mitchell wrote a beautiful book "Who Has Seen the Wind" which is about a young boy growing up during the Depression in the Canadian Prairies and he learns about the meaning of the cycle of life. I love this book :)

In Lakeroad public school I was the only student standing at my desk and everyone else were sitting. This annoyed my teacher so much that she wrote that I am uncoordinated on my report card. But there was a girl in the desk in front of me by the name of Linda Whitehead who had a bladder problem and every now and then a pool of urine would creep towards me and I would inch back away from the urine with my desk in fright!

We had a teacher Prcilla Harkins in Lakeroad public school in Sarnia. She was very strict and we called her Prcilla Godzilla! Once she told my sister to get up, she kicked her in the pants bum and then told her to sit down. I got the whole class in trouble once by drawing a smiley face on the window! But we softened her up by throwing her a Christmas Party!

Pizzas and Toilets: When my family was in Baaco Pizza in Fort McMurray, Alberta, our waitress was not very good in English. When she asked us what we wanted to order and we mentioned "pizza", she said: "I'm sorry Sir, we don't serve pizza here!" To make things worse I went to the washroom and the toilet overflowed leaving 3 inches of water on the washroom floor. I just went back to sit with my family at our table and watched the waiters frantically running into the washroom.

We once ordered takeout pizza from Paul's Pizza Place in Fort McMurray, Alberta. It never came so we repeatedly called and the restaurant kept saying "It's coming". We phoned the next day and they said "It's still coming!"

When I was on the washroom in WalMart at Oakridge Mall in London, Ontario, I swung the toilet partition door the wrong way and the toilet partition door fell off its hinges. I carefully balanced the door and went to wash my hands. While I was washing my hands a gentleman went into the stall. As he was doing his business on the toilet and unrolling the toilet paper, the toilet partition door fell on him and I heard him scream "Oh My God!"

I love to understand and talk to people. I truly believe that communication skills are a key to success. I wrote a thesis at Ryerson on "The Linkage of Negotiating Skills to Successful Project Management Decision Making" and I learned many leadership skills and people skills when I researched this topic. I also included two case studies (domestic and cross-cultural) where I interviewed two friendly project managers, a gifted senior interior designer, and 1 awesome president: Bruno Antidormi from the hallowed halls of Ellis-Don, George Nowack of Acres International, Mike Lidderdale of Atkinson McLeod Limited and President David Dugan of Delcan International Limited. I wrote this thesis using AppleWorks software on my first computer which was a cool Apple IIC computer with an Apple ImageWriter printer. It had no hard drive and used 5-1/4" floppy disks. I enjoyed playing with Apple Machine Language from a book that I bought, as well as tinkering with Apple Logo Graphics software. My first Computer Science course was at Northern HighSchool in Sarnia, Ontario (home of the Northern Vikings football team). Mr. Houtby was my teacher and he taught me my first programming language which was "Hypo". We used cards in which we filled out bubbles with a pencil or we had the option of using the keypunch machines.

Hosing the Nuns: When I worked one summer at Mount St. Joseph Motherhouse I trimmed the grass with a lawnmower. One day I chopped a sprinkler head with the lawnmower, but I did not tell anyone because I did not want to get in trouble. Nuns came outside and a geiser of water almost gushed all over them! Fortunately, my boss Fred could not see any marks on the blade (the material of the blade was harder than the material of the sprinkler head). That was a close call. Whew! I got away with it!

No more snowballs: When I was about 5 years old when we lived on Leopold Drive in Sarnia, I was fascinated with snow balls, so much so that I put some snow balls that I wanted to keep in my kitchen sink. When they melted, I started screaming that "somebody stole my snowballs!"

Oops! I probably shouldn't say this, so I won't mention any names. When my sister was young she by accident evesdropped her math teacher having a phone conversation with his mistress. The teacher stopped talking, went down the hallway and said "Zora, can you please put the phone down." Zora was just waiting to use the phone to call home for a ride. From then on whenever Zora made a mistake on her math tests, the teacher wrote "Oops!" and gave her perfect! I have adopted this Ooops approach. Whenever a student makes a silly mathematical blunder, I simply write "Oops!" and do not take off any marks.

My parody of Prince's song Raspberry Beret

She had a raspberry for brains

The kind of brain that you find in a second hand store

She had a raspberry for brains

She wasn't too smart

But she had a big heart! :-)

Windy's http://www.windyweb.com/design and

Jeff Bucchino's "The Wizard of Draws" http://www.wizardofdraws.com

Unix Tips

Temporary Links:

You Might Be A Physics Major...(in postscript)

You Might Be A Physics Major...(in pdf)

Canadian Technology Network

My School Schedule

AM 491y Links(Ical,Computer Simulation of Liquids,OpenGL,Moscito)

Physics 479y

Computer Science 320b

Applied Mathematics 422b (General Relativity Notes)

Applied Mathematics 455b (Particle Physics Notes)

Overheads from AM564b talkParallel Processing and CFD, (as latex file)(as postscript file)

Information for talk on Nuclear Matter as a Nonlinear Optical Medium and the Nonlinear Schroedinger Equation (NLSE) - site is under construction