About

gmunu, pronounced “gee-mew-new” and more typically written \(g_{\mu\nu}\), is the symbol we use to describe the metric of spacetime in the general theory of relativity (GR). As such, it is essentially the mother function for describing gravity in GR. This website serves as the public face of the Hughes research group at MIT, as well as the public access point for our catalog of gravitational wave sounds and visualizations. It tends to sit without an update for many years, until Hughes gets sufficiently embarrassed by its out-of-date character and implements a major overhaul. In a previous update, we switched over to using Hugo as the environment in which we do web development. A few years after that, the Cayman theme we used appeared to no longer be updated. As Hugo versions advanced, our local repository would not compile properly. We finally (summer 2026) found a version of this theme (linked in this text and in the footer text on these pages) that has been kept up to date, and with a bit of hacking were able to resurrect our repository and finally bring things up to date.

gmunu is also a somewhat rinky dink computer at the MIT Kavli Institute which hosts these pages, while sometimes simultaneously being used as a workstation … please bear that in mind when you download files!

These pages were created by Scott Hughes, adapted from an earlier version of gmunu made by UROP alumna Pei-Lan Hsu.