Tutorials

Tutorial history:

In Munich:

In the upcoming winter semester 2010/11 I’ll be one of the tutors for the lecture “Statistical Physics for Bachelors plus” by Michael Haack, or T4p for short. The exercise sheets and further information will be available on the lecture’s website. Also, you can download my solutions to the exercise problems there—however, it’s scanned handwriting only. If you have any questions or comments, just send me an eMail. Here is the time slot for my tutorial:

“Statistical Physics for Bachelors plus” tutorial: When? yet to be set Where? likely Theresienstraße 37, room A450

Dr. Haack plans to follow the statistical physics book of T. Fließbach for the better part of the semester. And of course the famous Feynman lectures on physics have a chapter on statistical physics...

Prior tutorial teaching:

During my time of undergraduate study, I worked as one of the physics tutors in Bielefeld for three semesters. The tutors—mostly undergraduates or PhD students—have to correct and grade the weekly exercise sheets issued by the respective lecturer and then discuss the solutions with the (undergraduate) students afterwards. We also help out with correcting and preliminary grading of the written exams at the end of the semester.

Besides presenting and discussing the right answers to the exercises I usually try to give a somewhat broader perspective on the underlying mathematics or deeper implications of the material discussed in the previous session and current exercise sheets. From my own experience it is somewhat reasonable to known for example that Hamiltonian mechanics can be elegantly treated as symplectic geometry or that the tensor calculus of generel relativity is actually some pretty simple special case of Riemannian and differential geometry.

Some general hints for students:

Besides quantum mechanics, the material presented in the theoretical and classical mechanics lecture can be considered to be the most important stuff during a physics’ study. It provides the foundations and the formalism to build upon in nearly all advanced classes. A thorough understanding is therefore of utmost importance, regardless of whether on chooses to continue in theoretical physics or aims for more applied branches. To support your studies in those subjects, I can recommend the following textbooks, which helped me in my time of those quite important subject of physics:

General Math Books: Bronstein et al.: Taschenbuch der Mathematik Walter: Gewöhnliche Differentialgleichungen Königsberger: Analysis 1 and Analysis 2 Recommended physics books for classical mechanics: Kuypers: Klassische Mechanik Greiner: Klassische Mechanik II, the first part might be useful as well Landau, Lifshitz: Mechanics and Classical Theory of Fields Jackson: Klassische Elektrodynamik Sexl, Urbantke: Relativity, Groups, Particles

The last physics book mentioned is a bit advanced at this point, but proves to be very useful when going deeper into the subject of special relativity, particularly in the context of (quantum) field theory. In the Scripts subsection you can find a rather lengthy script of the lecture by Prof. Kögerler, which I did typeset back when I prepared for the respective exams. Furthermore, a lot of information for quick lookup can be obtained from Wikipedia—provided that you keep a critical attitute when using this free web encyclopedia.