A Collector of Math and Physics Surprises | Hacker News Reader

A Collector of Math and Physics Surprises

quantamagazine.org

95 pointsbainsfather15 comments

"I needed a biography of somebody, so I went to the library. Unfortunately, the biography was not where it was supposed to be, but next to the spot was a biography of Lev Davidovich Landau."

This is why we have and should continue to keep (physical) libraries and why I love visiting them (along with second-hand bookshops and large scales used book sales). I discovered and bought probably 80+% of my books in this serendipitous way, king to the usual example of chaos in kneading of dough (https://books.google.com/books?id=GvnxBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA148&lpg=...)

Couldn't agree more. I happened upon an Annie Dillard book ("For the Time Being") at the last day of a HalfPrice Books moving sale. I'd never heard of her before, but I randomly picked it up, flipped through a few pages, and decided that I'd really enjoy it. Sure enough, it resonated with me and led me to her other works, which are equally - if not, more - compelling.

So, I discovered one of my favorite writers because there was a bunch of books before me and I decided to pick one up.

Does anybody know what the title of the biography about Landau is?

>Landau said, in the biography, “Don’t waste your time on mathematicians and lectures and so on — instead, find a book with the largest number of solved exercises and go through them all. That’s how you learn mathematics.”

Posting this because of a recent HN discussion touching on this. It really resonates with me because I feel that was key when I was learning calculus. I would like to see a lot more books with solutions.

The struggle you go through trying to understand your mistakes and correcting yourself is really the crux of learning.

I really wish someone would create a series of problem sets based on math.stackexchange. Many problems have multiple solutions and useful discussion in comments as well. The challenge is to curate their content.

Ideally such problem sets would accompany a specific textbook. It’s seems like such a simple idea that somebody should have done it already but I wasn’t able to find anything.

Serious question: Any idea what the licensing for such an endeavor would look like? My guess would be Stack Exchange 'owns' the content but I don't have time atm to read their ToS.

If your question is serious, why can't you be bothered to visit the site and look, instead of waiting for someone to read it to you?

This is a lovely sketch of someone whose path had been artist -> linguist -> mathematician <-> physicist, and is apparently good at all of them. Learning maths because he went to the wrong section of the library, etc.

Also, his demonstrations on youtube are great.

Case in point, making Kendama look like the most natural thing in the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkGawXjsltc

Aww man that was great. Thanks for sharing.

Inspiring.

Anyone know any problem-books that could match the (implied) breadth of the one indicated?

"I went back to the library and found the mathematics book with the largest number of problems. The book was in Russian, and I didn’t know Russian, but a young linguist is not afraid to pick up another language."

if you like that sort of thing, i highly recommend jearl walker's "the flying circus of physics" https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0471762733

Best collection of his work I could find.

http://www.msri.org/web/msri/public/tadashis-toys

I'm a bit dumbfounded by his level of intelligence.

recently enjoyed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkfDYOZ1p4Y

How bad a title for such a gem.

The unpretentious attitude towards science reminds me of Feynman. I wish there were more people in education like them.

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