How I got to work with Feynman on the covariant quark model

In the period 1968 - 1974 I was a graduate student and then a postdoc at Caltech and was involved with the developments of the quark and parton models. Most of this time I worked in close contact with Richard Feynman and thus was present from the parton model was proposed until QCD was formulated. A personal account is presented how the collaboration took place and how the various stages of this development looked like from the inside until QCD was established as a theory for strong interactions with the partons being quarks and gluons.Comment: LaTeX, 20 pages, 2 figures. Contribution to "50 Years of Quarks", to be published by World Scientifi

The 1958 Pekeris-Accad-WEIZAC Ground-Breaking Collaboration that Computed Ground States of Two-Electron Atoms (and its 2010 Redux)

In order to appreciate how well off we mathematicians and scientists are today, with extremely fast hardware and lots and lots of memory, as well as with powerful software, both for numeric and symbolic computation, it may be a good idea to go back to the early days of electronic computers and compare how things went then. We have chosen, as a case study, a problem that was considered a huge challenge at the time. Namely, we looked at C.L. Pekeris's seminal 1958 work on the ground state energies of two-electron atoms. We went through all the computations ab initio with today's software and hardware, with a special emphasis on the symbolic computations which in 1958 had to be made by hand, and which nowadays can be automated and generalized.Comment: 8 pages, 2 photos, final version as it appeared in the journa

The Faculty Notebook, September 1999

The Faculty Notebook is published periodically by the Office of the Provost at Gettysburg College to bring to the attention of the campus community accomplishments and activities of academic interest. Faculty are encouraged to submit materials for consideration for publication to the Associate Provost for Faculty Development. Copies of this publication are available at the Office of the Provost

The Faculty Notebook, October 2009

The Faculty Notebook is published periodically by the Office of the Provost at Gettysburg College to bring to the attention of the campus community accomplishments and activities of academic interest. Faculty are encouraged to submit materials for consideration for publication to the Associate Provost for Faculty Development. Copies of this publication are available at the Office of the Provost

A Conversation with David R. Brillinger

David Ross Brillinger was born on the 27th of October 1937, in Toronto, Canada. In 1955, he entered the University of Toronto, graduating with a B.A. with Honours in Pure Mathematics in 1959, while also serving as a Lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve. He was one of the five winners of the Putnam mathematical competition in 1958. He then went on to obtain his M.A. and Ph.D. in Mathematics at Princeton University, in 1960 and 1961, the latter under the guidance of John W. Tukey. During the period 1962--1964 he held halftime appointments as a Lecturer in Mathematics at Princeton, and a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey. In 1964, he was appointed Lecturer and, two years later, Reader in Statistics at the London School of Economics. After spending a sabbatical year at Berkeley in 1967--1968, he returned to become Professor of Statistics in 1970, and has been there ever since. During his 40 years (and counting) as a faculty member at Berkeley, he has supervised 40 doctoral theses. He has a record of academic and professional service and has received a number of honors and awards.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-STS324 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

NEXUS/Physics: An interdisciplinary repurposing of physics for biologists

In response to increasing calls for the reform of the undergraduate science curriculum for life science majors and pre-medical students (Bio2010, Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians, Vision & Change), an interdisciplinary team has created NEXUS/Physics: a repurposing of an introductory physics curriculum for the life sciences. The curriculum interacts strongly and supportively with introductory biology and chemistry courses taken by life sciences students, with the goal of helping students build general, multi-discipline scientific competencies. In order to do this, our two-semester NEXUS/Physics course sequence is positioned as a second year course so students will have had some exposure to basic concepts in biology and chemistry. NEXUS/Physics stresses interdisciplinary examples and the content differs markedly from traditional introductory physics to facilitate this. It extends the discussion of energy to include interatomic potentials and chemical reactions, the discussion of thermodynamics to include enthalpy and Gibbs free energy, and includes a serious discussion of random vs. coherent motion including diffusion. The development of instructional materials is coordinated with careful education research. Both the new content and the results of the research are described in a series of papers for which this paper serves as an overview and context.Comment: 12 page

A Conversation with Yuan Shih Chow

Yuan Shih Chow was born in Hubei province in China, on September 1, 1924. The eldest child of a local militia and political leader, he grew up in war and turmoil. His hometown was on the front line during most of the Japanese invasion and occupation of China. When he was 16, Y. S. Chow journeyed, mostly on foot, to Chongqing (Chung-King), the wartime Chinese capital, to finish his high school education. When the Communist party gained power in China, Y. S. Chow had already followed his university job to Taiwan. In Taiwan, he taught mathematics as an assistant at National Taiwan University until he came to the United States in 1954. At the University of Illinois, he studied under J. L. Doob and received his Ph.D. in 1958. He served as a staff mathematician and adjunct faculty at the IBM Watson Research Laboratory and Columbia University from 1959 to 1962. He was a member of the Statistics Department at Purdue University from 1962 to 1968. From 1968 until his retirement in 1993, Y. S. Chow served as Professor of Mathematical Statistics at Columbia University. At different times, he was a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, University of Heidelberg (Germany) and the National Central University, Taiwan. He served as Director of the Institute of Mathematics of Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and Director of the Center of Applied Statistics at Nankai University, Tianjin, China. He was instrumental in establishing the Institute of Statistics of Academia Sinica in Taiwan. He is currently Professor Emeritus at Columbia University. Y. S. Chow is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, a member of the International Statistical Institute and a member of Taiwan's Academia Sinica. He has numerous publications, including Great Expectations: The Theory of Optimal Stopping (1971), in collaboration with Herbert Robbins and David Siegmund, and Probability Theory (1978), in collaboration with Henry Teicher. Y. S. Chow has a strong interest in mathematics education. He taught high school mathematics for one year in 1947 and wrote a book on high school algebra in collaboration with J. H. Teng and M. L. Chu. In 1992, Y. S. Chow, together with I. S. Chang and W. C. Ho, established the Chinese Institute of Probability and Statistics in Taiwan. This conversation took place in the fall of 2003 in Dobbs Ferry, New York.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342304000000224 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

The education of Walter Kohn and the creation of density functional theory

The theoretical solid-state physicist Walter Kohn was awarded one-half of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his mid-1960's creation of an approach to the many-particle problem in quantum mechanics called density functional theory (DFT). In its exact form, DFT establishes that the total charge density of any system of electrons and nuclei provides all the information needed for a complete description of that system. This was a breakthrough for the study of atoms, molecules, gases, liquids, and solids. Before DFT, it was thought that only the vastly more complicated many-electron wave function was needed for a complete description of such systems. Today, fifty years after its introduction, DFT (in one of its approximate forms) is the method of choice used by most scientists to calculate the physical properties of materials of all kinds. In this paper, I present a biographical essay of Kohn's educational experiences and professional career up to and including the creation of DFT