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Carolyn Warfel, the Physics/Astro department administrative assistant, must really know my habits. I apparently received my first copy of American Scientist, the magazine of Sigma Xi, at the physics department rather than through normal student mail. And Carolyn knowingly left my copy on the table in the Physics Common Room... it was indeed the first place i went inside the Science Center. It's much cozier than in my lab, where the constant noise of the throbbing cryopump and the occasional but even more annoying rattling of the air handling system grate on the nerves.

But, I digress. While on the train coming back, I took a look at the magazine, and found the most wonderful little piece on group theory in the bedroom. The author basically introduces group theory in the context of symmetry operations in flipping a matress and ends up presenting a few groups like the Klein-4 group, the cyclic group C4, and S4, the symmetric group on 4 letters. It's a very readable piece (the author I think is a CS person rather than a mathematician) and I found myself wonderfully entertained. Here's a link to the article.

And, alas, school is but around the corner... Frank's assigned 15 problems for the first Optics seminar. But I'm looking forward to it. I looked at the book for Don Shimamoto's geometry class in the bookstore today. It's got both a rigorous development of Euclidean and non-Euclidean (particularly hyperbolic) geometries, as well as a lot of really interesting math history. Taking it instead of Real Analysis means missing out on a big piece of undergraduate basic math, but the Geometry class sounds like it would be a lot of fun. Also Shimamoto mentioned doing some differential geometry during the semester, stuff that would be useful in physics for things like GR.

Date: 2005-08-24 02:16 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] obcordate.livejournal.com
I read "Group Theory in the Bedroom" and immediately wondered at the content of the article. :P

It was a fun one, though. I think it's about time I flipped my mattress at home.

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