nibot | grad school: courses for this semester

Course No.	Title	Professor	Time	Status
Phy 418	Statistical Mechanics	Teitel	TuTh 09:40-10:55	Making up Incomplete
Phy 435	Lasers	Guo	MW 14:00-15:15	Interested
Phy 554	Cosmology	Melissinos	Th	Enrolled
BCS 547	Computational Neuroscience	Alex Pouget	W 09:00-12:00	Interested
Phy 402	Probability	Rajeev		TA
Phy 404	Linear Spaces	Rajeev		TA
ME 444	Continuum Mechanics	Lambropoulos	MW 15:25 16:40	Interested

You may remember I wrote about not seeing any courses listed, going in to see Adrian to ask about what to take, who, optimistic as always, wrote, "Come and see me, we'll find some courses!" But then he also saw that there were no courses. "What? No field theory? No quantum optics? No X, no Y, no Z? What is this department coming to?" So he rolled up his sleaves and declared that, despite his (pseudo!)retirement, he would take matters into his own hands and teach us a course! The course is Cosmology: the origin, history, evolution, structure, and fate of the universe. How's that for a grand undertaking?

The cognitive science class looks interesting enough, and, oddly, is crosslisted as a physics course. I suppose it's not actually so odd: the syllabus includes standard tasty engineering fare such as maximum liklihood estimation, Kalman filters, etc. Yummy.

What is Statistical Mechanics, you ask? I finally stumbled on the subtle definition that statistical mechanics is thermodynamics based upon a physical interpretation of the entropy as the logarithm of the number of available states.

For next semester, some of the options are:

Physics 420	Introduction to Solid State Physics	Teitel
Physics 411	Classical Mechanics	Rajeev
Physics 509	Non-relativistic Many-body Quantum Mechanics	Shapir

I've already taken an intro to solid state course, which I enjoyed (phonons!), (taught by Prof. Alessandra Lanzara at Berkeley, using Kittel's book, which, despite the amazon.com reviews, I think is quite fine), but presumably this one would be more advanced.

I'm definitely looking forward to Rajeev's classical mechanics course; shockingly I've never taken a course in classical mechanics (other than freshman physics of course). I do wish his differential geometry course would be offered again—I think I will lobby for it to be offered Spring 2007. My investigations revealed that this course has only been offered three times in recorded history (i.e. during the last thirteen years). It would be nice to take a differential geometry class before general relativity.

* * *

I just checked what Sussman is teaching this semester (at MIT), wondering if by any chance SICM was happening again. It appears he's teaching an interesting-looking course called Adventures in Advanced Symbolic Programming. [sigh.]