Recent content by dfan

For anyone wanting a preview of the content, Amazon now has the "Look inside" feature for this book, although it is only of the Kindle version and therefore looks rather ugly.

Springer is largely print-on-demand these days, which means that you are really rolling the dice when it comes to quality, unless you are able to purchase the books in person at a bookstore. I had heard that the printing quality was better when you ordered directly from the publisher than from...

Linear algebra is fundamental to quantum mechanics, so you definitely want to learn it well. I feel like I had a big leg up in my QM courses by already being very familiar with linear algebra. If you have learned other topics from Boas you can learn the fundamentals of linear algebra there as...

I really liked Hall's Quantum Theory for Mathematicians as a supplementary text, as it had clear discussions of the formal issues that "regular" quantum mechanics textbook like to sweep under the rug. I'm not sure how good it would be as your only book.

The canonical book on convex optimization is Convex Optimization by Boyd and Vandenberghe, downloadable for free. Boyd also has http://stanford.edu/class/ee364a/videos.html and slides from his Stanford class, which follows the book. It's a graduate-level book and class.

Here's the thing about Morin: he is trying to teach you to think like a physicist. The result is that the explanations and solutions can appear to be a bag of tricks; he's always doing things like exploiting symmetries or doing dimensional analysis instead of just plugging things into equations...

When I was an undergraduate, our text was French and I found it totally opaque (it didn't help that the lecturer was atrocious). I picked it up again last week and found it a model of clarity. I'm not sure what to conclude from this.

The thing about the Landau and Lifgarbagez classical mechanics book is that it is really terse and elegant. It is much better for summing up things that you already know than explaining them in an expository manner in the first place. I recommend watching Leonard Susskind's stellar video...

That was going to be my suggestion.

MIT is one.

Arthur Mattuck's Introduction to Analysis is great and perfect for self-study (I read it on my own). It combines the formality of a regular textbook with informal notes to the reader explaining the stuff that trips up most students. He's an awesome lecturer and his style carries through to the...

Yeah, but that's translating time, and the excerpt he quoted was about scaling time. Something's not quite right in kakarukeys' example, but I can't put my finger on it. Certainly it shouldn't matter whether you measure time in seconds or milliseconds. And in your L = T - V example, it...