Recent content by bromden

I live about 1800 miles from my hometown, even farther from where I spent my years as an undergraduate, which was my most recent home before this. It is difficult in the beginning, but if you have a good group of friends and find the folks in your research bearable, I think it eases the burden a...

Enjoy some time off: travel, read, do things that you always put off, spend time with family and friends, date around, work a part time job, and drink and be merry. If you have qualifiers, study for those. If you feel refreshed after a semester off, maybe contact the professor at your school...

For combinatorics, you should be able to find a good treatment in any probability theory text. I used "A First Course in Probability" by Ross. Though it's not the greatest book, it does the job. Honestly, just go to the library and thumb through a few books with similar call numbers as this book...

I'm nearing the end of my first year as a graduate student, so I'll try to give you some pointers that really helped me. I apologize in advance if I ramble a bit; I'm just learning some of these things, myself. 1) Don't be afraid to ask questions about what you're learning. There's a...

That seems to be a fair assesment. It seems that, like high school in general, your experience will boil down to your teachers. I had outstanding physics, literature, and TOK teachers, and so I immensely enjoyed those classes. My math teacher, on the other hand, was really terrible. (It was...

I went through the IB program at my school. Collegiate-wise, I attended UT Austin. While this is by no means a Harvard or Berkeley, it was difficult to get accepted if you weren't in the top 10% of your high school class. I was not even that close, to be honest. But, from what I understand...

O(\log_2 \log _2 n) efficiency? One can dream. :biggrin: In all seriousness, I would like to echo these statements. It comes down to a difference in emphasis. Of course, there is overlap between the two skill sets. As a data point, I work in a computational physics group. My particular...

I can't really give specific input on the schools, but it's unclear from your post whether you are talking graduate studies or undergraduate studies. If it's for graduate school, your decision should be based on some combination of availability of professors doing research in which you are...

I understand you're recommending this list based on obtaining a "classical education" in the arts. I'm curious, though, if you think these works are as relevant to people today as some modern works are. I haven't read all of those in the list, but I've read quite a few. Some I would certainly...

Are you using pseudocode to write out the algorithm for solving the problem before trying to code it? If you do this, it just becomes a matter of using the correct syntax. You may want to peruse the mathsci documentation to see if there is a "getting started with the language" manual...

You should be aware that the term "computational physics" is rather broad. It just means applying computational techniques to problems in physics. The fields are diverse: people study biophysics, condensed matter, lattice field theory, chaos, etc. That being said, you need to figure out what...

Well, I could have pegged you completely wrong. Essays like this serve a certain purpose: you are trying to effectively and succinctly convince them how you are qualified. With that being said, you really should fret over every sentence, word, and punctuation mark. No one is trying to...

To put it bluntly, your essay seems too forced/awkward. I just can't imagine that you talk anything like the style in which you have written your essay. Sometimes, that's all right; we say things and phrase things differently on the fly than when we are formulating sentences. The problem is that...

Yeah, complex analysis is pretty cool, and very useful to physics. (I will say, though, with the power contained in Mathematica, you won't use the methods to evaluate integrals as much as the 60-year-old professor who taught my course.) Also, if you ever take some analysis (it was in our...

(Emphasis mine.) I think that this is the take-away most people have when it comes to Calculus I and II. Yes, this is true. But it can be very difficult (or impossible) to find the anti-derivative of certain functions in terms of elementary functions. A classic example of the impossibility is...