Dr Angus H. Wright

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Research Fellow in Astronomy, working at the Ruhr-University Bochum.

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Welcome

This website primarily functions as the host place for my "Introduction to Statistics for Astronomers and Physicists" Lecture Notes. For those interested, it also contains links to my academic curriculum vitae and relevant websites.

About me

I am a Research Fellow in the German Centre for Cosmological Lensing (GCCL) at the Ruhr Universität Bochum (RUB), Germany. I undertook my PhD at the University of Western Australia, where I studied the growth and evolution of baryonic mass as a member of the Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) collaboration. Following my PhD, I worked for the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS) at the Argelander Institute for Astronomy at the Universität Bonn, where I began my work within weak gravitational lensing. For the last 5 years my research has focused on weak lensing survey science, and particularly on optimisation of photometric image reduction and analysis methods, systematics mitigation, and statistical analyses. Beyond weak lensing, I am a keen astrostatistician, an animated astronomy outreach presenter, and an enthusiastic but nonetheless mediocre golfer.

Introduction to Statistics for Astronomers and Physicists

At the RUB I teach an introductory course in statistics for students studying Physics and Astronomy. The course is designed to be accessible to students with little or no previous statistical training. I attempt to develop a new aspect of the course each semester, and welcome comments/feedback about the course and it's contents. Any comments can be added to my AstroStats github repository using the issues list.

The lecture notes are directly accessible here in two formats:

  1. The HTML-page format presents the lectures each on a single HTML page, with a persistent table of contents and dynamic media. LaTeX, images, and code are all rendered in-place. For those who prefer, the page can be switched between light and dark mode using the toggle button beneath the table of contents.
  2. The HTML-slides format presents the lectures on a series of HTML slides. The slides are somewhat unconventional, in that they are variable in length (i.e. not like powerpoint). However I have found this to be the best format for conveying the information here.

Additional formats (PDF, markdown, and rmarkdown) are available in the git repository. These formats have limitations, however, as they variously cannot display animations (PDF) or latex (markdown) in a generally satisfactory way. The lectures themselves are written in rmarkdown, and can be compiled into the other formats within R/Rstudio.

HTML Page Notes

PDF Handouts

HTML Short-Format Slides

HTML Long-Format Slides

Cloning the lecture notes

The lecture notes can be directly downloaded in many formats from the github repository, or from the command line as below:

git clone git@github.com:AngusWright/AstroStats.git

Lecture Recordings

Recordings of the Lectures from the Summer Semester 2021 (held virtually) are available on my YouTube channel in the Lectures playlist.

Various academic and non-academic websites on which I am active and/or which are relevant to my career can be found below:

Curriculum Vitae

My long-form Academic CV is available in PDF format here.