FAQs
- Is this course open on demand? You can work through it at any time and at any pace, and the autograder will keep track of your progress. If you organize a study group on piazza, you'll have a live community to interact with and learn from, week by week. Upon completion of the course, we can email you a completion certificate. And do sign up on piazza, even if you do not intend to do the homeworks - you might find discussions on the course forum helpful.
- In my country YouTube.com is blocked? If YouTube.com is blocked in your location, perhaps we can organize that the course videos be uploaded tobaidu.com or similar.
- Are there any other text books you might recommend? I wish there was a book - but this is an advanced, active research area, so I am reading a broad range of books and articles myself: here is my library, here are the working notes for ChaosBook, and here is how you could help the project :) Try clicking through links on ChaosBook.org/FAQ. General references are discussed here. And then in every chapter, we try to cite the sources I found helpful in the remarks. We'll update that whenever students tell us about other sources they found helpful.
- Is statistical mechanics a prerequisite? No. But every little bit helps.
- Is it OK to cheat? On internet nobody knows you are a dog, and we know of no way to make grading foolproof. At this advanced graduate level, only “exam” that works is one-on-one discussion. Fortunately, no money is changing hands here, only knowledge. We are in this together and we trust each other.
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Is this course available in the Power Point format?
Yes.
If you do not "get it", here is the blackboard version for 4th graders (yes Olivia, the zeta function on the blackboard is taken from ChaosBook.org, and you will derive it yourself in this course)