Recent content by Jorriss

To clarify, WannabeNewton already understands general relativity at a level beyond any first year graduate sequence. The issue is that QFT is really boring.

I don't understand this suggestion. Sakurai is not an introductory text for self study. He doesn't even do the hydrogen atom because it's assumed the reader has seen it.

Given your background Ballentine seems like a crazy choice, it is far too advanced in my opinion. Zettili is a much better choice for self study given it has quality explanations and a large variety of worked problems.

Sounds like you need something along the lines of Royden or Folland (Folland is more advanced and technical).

I believe it is allowed if you pose it as: Here's a well known theorem, I don't understand how it is compatible with [your argument], as opposed to, say, I have an original new theorem.

You shouldn't even be considering publishing it. Every single thing Gauss has done that is known has been wildly scrutinized and studied. If something he did is wrong, it's already known. You should, in my opinion, just post the theorem you are interested in in the appropriate section and...

Electronic structure problems in computational chemistry and physics rely on variational methods quite heavily and are fairly approachable for an undergraduate with moderate quantum mechanics background.

How did you decide you know all those subjects at the level of a high school junior?

There's no set method. There's a variety of techniques one may use - for proving sqrt(2) is irrational, for example, one generally goes for proof by contradiction. You may want to look at a book on mathematical reasoning or proofs. Velleman, Eccles, etc. There are many options.

One thing a friend of mine made me do was learn rook/king, queen/king and pawn/king end games. Early on its amazing how many players can't actually finish a game (at least within time controls). Remember that en passent exists, another mistake very new players make. And lastly, don't always...

Yeah, it does (if I'm interpreting your statement correctly). You only need to check continuity on a basis, so if you have a bijection ##f: X \to Y## between two metric spaces and it is continuous on a basis for ##Y## and an open map on a basis for ## X## it's a homeomorphism.

Yes there is an analog of dominated convergence for Riemann integrable functions but it is decidedly less useful. Suppose ## f_n: [a,b] \to \mathbb{R} ## and for some M we have that ##|f_n(x)| < M ## for each n. If ##f_n \to f ## pointwise and ##f## is riemann integrable, then you may...

As it would turn out, no it wasn't. It was the first problem in a joke qualifying exam. The other problems made it far more obvious that it was not serious. Anyhow, thanks for your insight into the joke I suppose!

I came across an interesting problem that I have made no progress on. Let f be an analytic function on the disc ##D = \{z \in C ~|~ |z| < 1\}## satisfying ##f(0) = 1##. Is the following statement true or false? If ##f(a) = f^\prime(a) ## whenever ##\frac{1+a}{a}## and ##\frac{1-a}{a}## are...

Stone-Weierstrass theorem(s)