Leonard Susskind: Statistical Mechanics

[dx]

Video lectures on statistical mechanics by Leonard Susskind of Stanford are now available on itunes.

[Sankaku]

Awesome - thanks for letting us know!

[EAAL]

It's a set of 6 courses on theoretical physics foundations.
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=stanforduniversity&view=playlists

[sokrates]

Irrespective of his great scientific achievements Leonard Susskind is just a terrible, terrible lecturer.

He has no sense of organization, time management, no skill of elaborating coherently.
Bad handwriting, long boring lectures ,where only a few sections of a topic end up being covered plus mediocre teaching.

He's just unbelievably dull.
loriagarcia, if you are serious about a fresh start, just don't do it with Susskind. He'll suck that excitement right out of you. In about 10-15 minutes into the lecture, you'll decide it wasn't a good idea after all. Stay away from him!

[Count Iblis]

Irrespective of his great scientific achievements Leonard Susskind is just a terrible, terrible lecturer.

He has no sense of organization, time management, no skill of elaborating coherently.
Bad handwriting, long boring lectures ,where only a few sections of a topic end up being covered plus mediocre teaching.


Which isn't that bad as most of the learning is done by students at home or during problem sessions when trying to solve difficult problems.

[aPhilosopher]

Watching him lecture is good motivation for me. It makes me think that I can be a space cadet (allright, allright, you caught me; space major) and still do good things in science.

[Haelfix]

To each his own I guess. I think Lenny is a really good lecturer. Maybe not Coleman, Zee or B Greene good, but still way above average.

The only issue I have with his lectures are the students asking stupid questions and then arguing about it. It ends up wasting 30 minutes of his time per set.

[dx]

I think he's a great lecturer. He's certainly better than any lecturer I've had at my university.

[aPhilosopher]

His lectures have helped me a lot. I find that they're a good introduction. They help me "crack open" a subject. One needs real books after that but he makes the subjects very clear. Keep in mind that he's teaching people without the necessary math background so that's got to be tough. I'd like to see him teach a QM course where he doesn't have to stop to give trig identities.

[jackiefrost]

I thought he did a pretty decent job in his Classical Mechanics series. I know, I know - there's a vast amt of stuff missing. Big deal. Like Count Ibiis said - most of the learning is done outside the lecture hall when the student struggles with problem solving and assimilating from diverse sources. A good lecturer will usually be able bring some new twist to the subject that you wouldn't have gotten elsewhere. For example, in the CM lectures (Lect. 6 I think), I "saw the light" regarding the Legendre transformation with a simple graphic that I've never seen anywhere else. It made a huge difference in my understanding of the relationship between the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian that I wouldn't have grasped had I not taken the time to study those lectures.

I'm grateful to Leonard Susskind and Stanford U. for making all of these lectures available. I'm also grateful to MIT for their Open Course-Ware videos. [I wish I could find a good video lecture series on Differential Geometry]