Recent content by drkatzin

Just took my GRE general today! I really liked the dictionary.com online gre flashcards

Agreed. Instead of fifty different activities, I think what admission committees really want to see is one activity that you pour a ton of passion and effort into. The obvious reason is that a university is a community, and they need people to fill various niches. An orchestra can't function if...

To me, the place to start would be the first four chapters of Eisberg and Resnick. I don't think Griffiths, Shankar, and Sakurai really motivate QM properly. E&R give a lot of historical background, experiments that contradicted classical models, etc. I feel that one needs to convince oneself...

Thank you Mute! This makes a lot of sense.

Usually in statistical physics, when your system has a large number N of particles, you take the continuum limit -- you let N\rightarrow\infty, and convert sums to integrals (with an appropriate normalization factor). My understanding is that as a finite number tends to infinity, the infinity...

Yep, programming itself has nothing to do with either calculus or physics. The book is self-contained, and intended for use by all ages (I know fifth and sixth graders who learned to program from it). But I don't think it's dumbed down or anything.

For anyone who's interested, the Schemer's guide can be found here: http://www.schemers.com/tsg.html

Agreed. Differential geometry jumps out at me as something you'd have a tough time understanding without at least some real analysis. Certainly you'd need to know multivariable calculus to have a prayer -- global differential geometry deals with generalizing multivariable calculus on a 2D...

Yep. You actually don't need any background, other than basic logical thinking.

For the differential equations stuff, the hardest thing you would probably need is 1st-order linear ODE. Read the first few sections of Tenenbaum and Pollard and you should be fine.

I used Young and Freedman, but there's way more in a college physics text than on the AP physics C exams. To ace the exam, make sure to read a book written specifically for the test. The best one I've seen is 5 steps to a 5, followed by Princeton Review

Also C++ is becoming slightly outdated; it seems like the language to learn right now is Java, with Python as a close second. However, if you REALLY want to learn the programming thought process and have fun doing it, you cannot beat Scheme as a starting point. There's a really nice book called...

There are a few reasons: (1) Nothing organizes your thought process like programming. Once you ingrain these skills, you will find physics problems much easier to solve. (2) Physics is more than pencil-and-paper math exercises. These days, many of the major advances depend on parsing through...

I've only read 1,2, and parts of 3 and 5 so far, but this is what I think: You should read 1 before any other book. 2, 3, and 5 could be read concurrently. 5 requires some quantum eventually. I read 2 by itself, and now I'm reading 3 and 5 at the same time. 3 should be followed by 4; 5 should...

Senior year! 8.321 Quantum Theory 1 (Grad) 8.333 Statistical Physics 1 (grad) 18.384 Seminar in Physical Mathematics (undergrad) 6.336J Introduction to Numerical Methods (grad) 21M.030 Intro to World Music (undergrad)