Adding Resistances and Capacitances in Introductory Electricity

We propose a unified approach to addition of resistors and capacitors such that the formulae are always simply additive. This approach has the advantage of being consistent with the intuition of the students. To demonstrate our point of view, we re-work some well-known end-of-the-chapter textbook problems and propose some additional new problems.Comment: 13 pages, LaTeX, uses additional packages, 7 eps figures; one comment added after the truncated-cone resisto

Minimal Models of CFT on Z_N-Surfaces

The conformal field theory on a Z_N-surface is studied by mapping it on the branched sphere. Using a coulomb gas formalism we construct the minimal models of the theory.Comment: 16 pages, latex, no figures; two important early references on the coset construction have been included; to appear in Mod. Phys. Let

Addition laws in introductory physics

We propose a unified approach to addition of some physical quantities (among which resistors and capacitors are the most well known) that are usually encountered in introductory physics such that the formulae required to solve problems are always simply additive. This approach has the advantage of being consistent with the intuition of students. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we propose and solve several problems. We hope that this paper can serve as a resource paper for problems on the subject