Elementary Mathematical Methods

If I can get a total of 10 people interested I will teach a course on Elementary Mathematical Methods for Science. This will consist of units on algebra, estimation and dimensions, geometry, trigonometry, analytic geometry, calculus, linear algebra, multivariable calculus, differential equations, and probability and statistics. Possibly other topics as well.

I have 4 people interested already.

Here is how the course will be conducted:

1) Each Friday I will place material on a web site for the course. This will be in the form of a cdf file, a format created by Wolfram Research. Many of these documents will contain interactive material for you to play with. There will be a number of challenges: 2-3 will be done in complete detail, 1-2 will be done in less detail, 1-2 will be done in little detail, and 1-2 will have no detail.

2) Discussions of the work will continue on the blog until the students are done with them. If this takes 2 months, then I know that I have done something wrong.

3) Throughout the week I will monitor the blog to see what responses I get. This will determine the new material I put up on Friday of that week. I will also put up a record of the discussion formatted for the mathematics

4) Upon completion of an assignment by all participants I will post a transcription of the discussion formatted in Mathematica and converted into a cdf.

5) If people are interested, I will have a live session on Saturday evenings beginning at 8PM central time and going until 10 PM central time. This will be via Skype and will use TeamViewer as the desktop sharing software so that I can answer questions directly.

6) If I can figure out a way to do it efficiently I will produce audio lectures keyed to the material, so you can follow along.

New Information Theory Site on MAST

I have formalized my notes on information theory and placed them on the MAST website. You can find tham at http://www.madscitech.org/information/information.html

Been Away Again

I have been away for a couple of months. In that time my co-author on the book, Leonard Susskind, and I have been working on the final draft of our book THEORETICAL MINIMUM: Claswsical Mechanics and hope to have it done in a few weeks.

MAST is working on developing education modules for basic science.

I have had a paper on numerical modeling of the diffusion equation accepted for publication in The Mathematica Journal.

I will be working on the show The Wonders of Physics this year.

I will be doing more in the coming days.

Lots of Things: Mathematica Consulting to Quantum Gravity to Storm Chasing

It has been a month and a half since my last post. Sounds almost like confession, doesn't it?

I could say that I have been snowed under with work, I have been sick for a week, I have been planning and executing the storm chase from Hell and another that was very successful. I could say that I have been trying to get MAST into the Mathematica Consulting game. I could say that I have been working on a new idea in quantum gravity. All of these things are true, and yet none of them are sufficient.

The truth is that I have been somewhat lazy. For that I apologize. I will not promise not to do it again.

Some new results

MAST has begun to post some research results!

1) I have started to do some dripping handrail models of accretion disks. You can find them here: http://www.madscitech.org/csg/accretion.html

2) James Firmiss and I have begun serious work on neutron star equations of state, results will be put up shortly.

3) Chris Winfield is giving a talk on local solvability at the American Mathematical Society meeting in New Orleans, that talk is located here: http://www.madscitech.org/csg/AMS10mintalk.pdf

4) We are doing research and development of database capabilities in Mathematica, mostly due to the efforts of Rocky Wenz.

More results will be reported as they occur!

Project Updates

Hello!

I have been insanely busy the last week. Had a great Thanksgiving!

Just completed Chapter 9 in the book project, this is a survey of linear algebra. I am about to start in on chapter 10, Leonard Susskind's classical mechanics Lecture 5.

I am also developing the program for the Institute for Scientific Computing Summer School program. I am also working on developing courses for teaching Mathematica 8 online.

That's all for now.

Project Updates

I am about to finish chapter six of the book project.

We (MAST) are planning a Summer School on Computational Physics; this will tentaively be held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Department of Physics and will be held from 15 June 2011 to 15 August 2011. Check out the MAST website for details.

We are exploring the possibility of Mathematica training over the web. This will include beginner training all the way up to advanced applications.

New developments at MAST

MAST (Madison Area Science and Technology) will be seeking funding from the NSF to open a computational science center and, if funded, it will allow us to offer internships for High School Seniors, Citizen Scientists, Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students, and even Post-docs who are interested in computational science, including, but not limited to: astrophysical fluid dynamics, compact objects, accretion disks, relativity, cosmology, mathematical physics, numerical methods, fluid dynamics, atmospheric modeling, shock wave phenomena, chaotic dynamical systems, scattering, quantum information theory, solution methods for ODEs and PDEs, and bioinformatics. We will handle all necessary educational requirements to bring the students up to speed (including training in Mathematica).

We will even be accepting a number of foreign internships.

The proposal will be submitted to the NSF by 27 October of this year.

The Mind of a Theorist - The Relaunch of the Column

You can find the rewritten and reformated column at www.madscitech.org
I will be placing a new column up every week.