Nathan Clisby's homepage

Welcome to my homepage! I'm a mathematical physicist in the Department of Mathematics at Swinburne University of Technology.

Here you will find some details about my research (including lists of possible research topics for students and collaborators, and my publications), and various project pages where you can find interactive applications and visualisations.

Quick links: Google Scholar; visualisation of the pivot algorithm for sampling self-avoiding walks; visualisation of the backbite algorithm for sampling Hamiltonian paths.

18 March, 2026:

I've created various web apps that I am using to communicate concepts from vector calculus to students of MTH20017 Mathematical Methods and Statistics for Engineering. They are designed for teaching, but may also be useful for students to build intuition.

• Scalar fields and the gradient
• Vector fields, divergence, and curl
• Directional derivatives
• Tangent lines and planes

And, here’s a Towers of Hanoi puzzle/game, that I plan to use as an activity in a future discrete mathematics unit, tentatively entitled “Networks, games, and algorithms”. Students will figure out how many moves it takes to solve the Towers of Hanoi puzzle as a function of the number of rings, and we will have a Towers of Hanoi speed solving competition:

• Towers of Hanoi game

Please feel free to contact me if you find these things (or my other bits and pieces) interesting or useful.

I’ll do a major refactor of this website “soon”.