Recent content by mxbob468

Well I didn't make it up on my own? I got the term from here. This is in fact exactly what I have. This part I don't understand. My understanding is that stationary/steady-state distributions are joint distributions ie vectors whose entries sum to 1. Are you saying that if I start in some...

I'm taking my first Markov processes class and I'm a little confused. This is in relation to a HW problem that I've been wrestling with for the past couple of hours. The task is to find all of the stationary distributions of a Markov process (finite state space). I know that if my process...

you pop up a lot in these threads and i appreciate your input but i think you should warn people that you graduated from caltech and that that probably opened a lot of doors for you that it wouldn't for a physics phd from a typical state school.

i'm reading 'gauge theories in particle physics' by aitchison (http://www.ft.uam.es/personal/hernandez/QFT/Aitchison--Gauge-Theories-in-Particle-Physics-Volume-1.pdf) and i have some questions: 1. middle of page 23 right before section 1.2.3 heading: he implies because of the spectroscopy...

problem 1: Homework Statement this isn't quite a problem but a general confusion about how to setup the problem. for example: a cylinder of radius R with mass M has a force T applied at its center of mass, pointing horizontally to the right. assuming the cylinder only rolls without...

i get your point. fine so id have to pay my way through but that part of the question was an afterthought anyway. the salient part was whether a such a teaching institution exists and barring that what should i do...

there was a post on www.reddit.com/r/science a couple of days ago that involved someone bitching about dealing with foreign grad students teaching all of their classes wherein someone commented something along the lines of "you should have gone to a private teaching college instead of a research...

oh the tone of any such post that i write would be way to sarcastic and facetious. best to let the professionals do it.

this might not be the right place for forum suggestions but this is certainly the forum where these suggestions should be implemented... can we a get a faq (and concomitant deletions) for these topics: can i get into harvard/stanford/cambridge/oxford/mit? am i too dumb for...

i have a fairly radical view of education in the sciences so bear with me: i think forcing you to develop your own intuition is the most efficient way to learn for everyone because the point of a course of study in a science is not to learn the material but to learn how to solve problems (at...

you're missing the point of rudin and maybe books in general. they shouldn't give you "intuition" but should force you to develop it on your own and that's exactly what rudin does. besides who's to say what kind of intuition you should have for whatever concept eg you might intuitively...

mathematica saves the day: Two series can only meaningfully be composed when the point about which the first series is expanded corresponds to the limiting value of the second series at its expansion point.

in general I'm trying to figure out a way to work with taylor series more efficiently. this means i want to be able to write down the taylor series of a complicated function just by knowing the taylor series(es?) of the component functions. I've figured out how to do products and quotients...

isn't that cheating (the institution)?

i'm committed to getting a phd but my undergrad career is lackluster (~3.7 gpa, pure math major physics minor, no research experience, peace corps math teacher, yet to take either gre) so i was thinking about getting a masters and doing research while completing the masters. i know people have...