Projects: Education

Explanation:

Here are some notes, articles, and resources I've created or linked to to help organize my thoughts and studies, especially those regarding physics and mathematics.

Life Resources:

Rational life design and "life hacking" should be part of every rational person's life. Here are some notes that may help in this area.

LaTeX Resources:

There is great value in writing your own explanations of concepts and in compiling comprehesive, organized notes. Moreover, there is great value in displaying these concepts and notes in beautiful text via LaTeX. I'll have to say more about this later when I have the time, but for now I'll just give these resource to those of you who are already familiar with LaTeX.

Academic Writings:

Here are my more-developed papers and the beginnings of an axiomatic physics derivation database. If you wish, you may also see my less-developed papers and drafts.

Outside Sources:

Outside sources can provide excellent articles that I would rather suggest to you than try to immediately improve.

Books:

Here are a lists of textbooks that I have, a list of some books that I am interested in reading, and some other interesting book lists that I've found online. I'll comment on books that I've read when I can. I realize that a one-sentence comment is not very valuable to anyone who would like to get a sense of a book, so I'll try to say something substantial whenever I do happen to comment on the quality of a book. Also, if you're having a hard time finding a book at the library that I have, perhaps I'll let you borrow it if I'm not reading it at the time.

Physics PhD Exam:

To get a Ph.D. in physics, one must pass a qualifying exam of some sort, in addition to other requirements. At UCLA, this is a two-day written problem-solving examination that we call the comprehensive exam, or "the comps". Here are some resources to help physics grad students at UCLA and elsewhere in studying for their own exams or understanding.

Microscopy Manuals:

These are some practical student manuals for operating a scanning probe microscope (including atomic force microscopy, or AFM, in tapping mode, and magnetic force microscopy, MFM) and sample preparation. I wrote them when I worked in Dr. Chuhee Kwon's lab at California State University, Long Beach, and they are written specifically for people in Dr. Kwon's lab, who will have access to the microscope and resources mentioned in the manuals. However, if you are learning how to use a scanning probe microscope for the first time and do not happen to be in Dr. Kwon's lab, these manuals may still be useful to you.

The microscope referred to in the manuals is a "Nanoscope" made by Digital Instruments. More verbosely, it is known as a multi-mode scanning probe microscope (MM SPM).

Unfortunately, I wrote these using Microsoft Word. I did not know back then how to write beautiful LaTeX documents.