RIP David Goodstein (1939–2024)

David Goodstein (an emeritus physics professor at Caltech) died yesterday. This is the end of an era.

I watched many of The Mechanical Universe videos in high school. The beginning and end of each video showed Goodstein lecturing to students in the big Caltech physics lecture hall. I had Goodstein for Physics 1a (mechanics) in fall of my frosh year in that same lecture hall, and I remember how surreal it felt. That was one of my big "Wow, I am now at Caltech." things. Also, I came out of lectures feeling that I understood the material — but then I tried the homework and saw that I didn't actually yet understand it.

(h/t Barry Simon)

What Happens at Caltech Stays at Caltech

Well, obviously.

Physics Fashion Police: Save the Pocket Protector

Well, this is a bit awkward.

There's a new edition of "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" that just came out this month. Funnily and interestingly, the photo on the cover is the same as before, but the pocket protector is gone. How unfashionable! @dschwa8059 @phalpern https://t.co/wLaCGynpS2 via @amazon pic.twitter.com/7MOrBVnzVa

— Ash Jogalekar (@curiouswavefn) February 14, 2018

(Tip of the cap to John Dudley.)

RIP Joel Franklin (1930–2017)

Joel Franklin, one of my favorite Caltech professors, died 11 days ago. Caltech posted an obituary yesterday.

During Junior year, a bunch of us took Joel Franklin's AMa 153 course on stochastic processes (especially during the first term, which could be used to satisfy Caltech's probability and statistics requirement). I also took Joel Franklin's linear programming course during my senior year.

Let's start with a story from Steve Van Hooser: "We'll start with the best story. Steven Michael, going through his material at the end of the term, found a homework set for Stochastic Processes that he forgot to turn in. He went to Franklin's office, and described his mistake. Franklin merely said: "Well..did you do it?" And Steven said yes. "Well...is it right?" And Steven said he thought so. So Franklin wrote a handwritten message to the registrar saying something to the effect of "Dear Judith [Goodstein], please change Steven's grade in AMa153 to an A. -J.N. Franklin". And that was that."

We invited Joel Franklin as a dinner guest in Lloyd House a couple of times, and Steve recounted a couple of those in his Facebook post.

Additionally, in Legends of Caltech III, we included a story filled with quotes from Joel Franklin. They give a good idea of the Joel Franklin experience, and this compilation from Jason Kastner (which I remember finding on his website at some point) inspired me to compile quotations from other professors who uttered many witticisms. Here is a version of the story from a .pdf of a pageproof version of the book. (I am pretty sure the typo in "the Navy way" definition was corrected before the final version.)

When I was in graduate school, I suggested Joel Franklin's book Methods of Mathematical Economics for the SIAM "Classics in Applied Mathematics" series, and thankfully that worked out. (Franklin originally published it with Springer, but there was some sort of falling out, and for a while the only way to get a "new" copy was as printed notes.)

In his honor, today we should all do something in "the Navy way".

(Tip of the cap to Steve Van Hooser, who was part of our AMa 153 contingent.)

"The Mechanical Universe" Videos Now on YouTube

The videos of The Mechanical Universe are now on YouTube. This gives me flashbacks to my Physics 1a with David Goodstein at Caltech. (My physics teacher in high school showed us many of these videos, and then I had an odd sense of deja vu when I had Goodstein as a lecturer in the fall term of my frosh year at Caltech.)

(Tip of the cap to Guillermo Valle Pérez.)

RIP Tom Apostol (1923–2016)

Caltech lost a legend today: Tom Apostol has died.

Here I quote from Kevin Hickerson's Facebook post (whence I got the news): Our department lost a great one today. Tom M. Apostol, emeritus professor of Mathematics, is well known among math and science students the world over, including 100% of all Caltech alums, for his mathematically rigorous and technically unmatched textbooks on Calculus, affectionately known as "Tommy I" and "Tommy II" (1923-2016) RIP

I never did take a class with Apostol, as he retired from teaching classes just before I got to Tech. I skipped Math 1, so I only ended up using Tommy II as a textbook.

Update (5/10/16): Caltech has posted an obituary.

Bring Your Pet to School Day: Caltech Edition

I don't remember ever hearing about the young lioness that got to hear a freshman physics lecture at Caltech, although it's possible that I simply forgot about this story (with picture proof from a very familiar lecture hall). Wow!

"SKIES App Aids Learning in Caltech Classrooms"

I want to congratulate my friend and classmate Julius Su (of capacitor fame, among other things) for his awesome innovations that are helping education at Caltech. He is also doing some excellent outreach efforts.

I am looking forward to when he's famous, so I can tell my many Julius stories to a wider audience. (Capacitors --- and counting to 1 and occasionally perhaps toilet paper or predicting the number somebody is thinking of by looking into their eyes --- will of course play an important role.) Julius is already very much one of the legends of Caltech, and his innovations in education are going to make a huge contribution to the world (and are already making major contributions at Caltech and among local students).

A Most Excellent Welcome Back to Caltech Indeed: Googly Eyes at Caltech

So, I am here at Caltech today to be a dinner guest at Lloyd House, and I was so tired (and was just getting some work done) that I didn't even notice some excellent handiwork.

As part of my e-mail exchange with the current Lloyd President (Grace Park '16), I included the following message:

In case Lloydies want to have a completed prank ready for campus that Friday (I estimate a few hours of work when split across many people the night before), my recent inspiration for such things is summarized in the following two webpages: webpage 1, webpage 2

Simple, but elegant...

(This is inspired by one well-placed set of such eyes I noticed on the Stanford campus recently.)

Anyway, it's just a thought. :)  I don't arrive until the Friday, so I'll see when I get there if this happens.

They were up until 5am setting up googly eyes all over campus, and as you can see they picked some very sweet spots. (These are not anywhere close to all of them. There is also one pair on a door to the math building, a couple of cyclopean ones, etc. Maybe some more pictures will eventually show up?) And perhaps my favorite: one on Millikan Library itself!!!

I have seen people taking pictures of the Millikan bust with the googly eyes and indicating that it looks even creepier that way (and it's when I accidentally saw that after walking around a bit that I realized that it looks like they actually did it... I was pretty well zombified until then), I have on quite a few occasions heard people talk about the various places they have seen it, etc. Apparently, the Lloydies stayed up until 5am working on this.

Way to do me proud, modern Lloydies! I approve! (Let me count the ways... So awesome!) Now that's the right way to welcome an alum back to campus!

Update: Here is one more picture I took. (Also note that this prank is not only simple and elegant, but also inexpensive and very photogenic.)

Invertible Yogurt

The yogurt that I had on Saturday successfully passed the Invertibility Test* (that is, it was invertible), so I knew that it was safe to eat.

* The Invertibility Test (tm) is especially important for milkshakes, as passing this test is the only way to ensure that they are safe to consume. (For other food items, the only way to pass this test is to not be invertible.)

For more about invertible milkshakes, see Legends of Caltech III and also one of its web-only stories.

(Tip of the cap to Frances Schaeffer for taking the picture.)

Caltech Strikes the Rose Bowl... Again

Caltech has struck the Rose Bowl again in a prank that also harkens back to the classic Hollywood sign prank of 1987.

On this website, Caltech highlighted several of the most famous pranks in its history (as compiled by the Legends I, II, and III books).

Absolutely Legendary

I decided to check what Google Books felt are the most similar books to Legends of Caltech III: Techer in the Dark. Some of them make sense, but others are a bit surprising. The following books were on the first page:

Lectures on Physics: Exercises by Feynman (yay!)

Legends of Caltech (of course)

Proceedings [Volume 1] of the National Academy of Sciences (ok, I can go with that)

The Brotherhood of Eternal Love: From Flower Power to Hippie Mafia: The Story of the LSD Counterculture (I actually know why that is there ... something to do with "Lloyd grade")

and ... Mentally Incontinent (wait... what?)



P.S. Wait until the movie comes out!

News About the Legends of Caltech Movie

News about the Legends of Caltech is spreading! Here you can find an interview with a couple of the participants on the blog Super Hot Nerds.

New to the Blogroll: "LegendsofCaltechProject"

OK, I admit that I added the capitalization and describe in my blogroll what the blog legendsofcaltechproject actually is (a blog about a project about making a movie version of Legends of Caltech) instead of using the technically correct title.

This blog has its first entry: an article in The California Tech about the project. (This issue of The Tech includes an article about the proposed new core curriculum, which continues recent trends to reduce the amount of mathematics and physics that's required. I know there are a large variety of things out there, but I think that's a shame.)

Legends of Caltech: The Movie

I've been helping out with this project for quite a while (I first read a script draft in February 2010, for example, and my discussions with the script-writers date back to February 2009 or earlier), and it finally gets to become public information! Tell all of your friends, neighbors, and countrymen (and maybe even Romans) about the "Legends of Caltech" movie!

The movie is inspired by a series of books in which I've had a certain amount of very deep involvement. :) In fact, I am co-editor of the third book, which you should buy. ("Buy my book!")

As of today, the movie has a Facebook page.

More press coverage for Caltech pranks

Here is a recent article from the Pasadena Star-News about pranking at Caltech in general and the Rose Bowl pranks in particular. My Legends coauthor (Autumn Looijen '99) and I were interviewed for this article. (Whenever somebody contacts Caltech's PR department about things related to pranks, they are basically passed along to us at this point.) I love my comment in the article's ending, as well as how the article's author stated how I "declined to state" the identity of an upcoming movie that has a 'DEI' in it. :)

In looking up this article (which I had neglected to do because of how busy I was), I also noticed that Elise Kleeman '03 is apparently a staff writer for the Pasadena Star-News. I guess she's been very successful getting into journalism.

Also, for people reading this who know of events in my personal life, remember that my blog policy (just like my general perspective) is that the show must go on and the tone of my blog entries is not necessarily going to be affected by that. Aside from the present ambiguous comment, I'm just making an active decision to leave that stuff off of this venue. (Also, that should not be interpreted as callousness. Blogging is a form of escapism, and sometimes I need escapism more than at other times.)

Organizing Legends of Caltech IV

Today I spent several hours working a preliminary outline for the table of contents of Legends of Caltech IV, which should come out either May 2010 or May 2011.

As I discussed recently, I had been getting the urge to start working on the new Legends book, which was an excellent sign that the pain associated with the sprint to the finish line for Legends III had subsided substantially. The additional benefits of working on this today included (in no particular order) getting the thing organized so that we could start getting the actual stories more easily (i.e., the benefit that directly pertains to the book!), allowing me to not think about things that are still depressing me (I don't know when I'll truly get over that stuff; it's definitely going to take a while), and allowing me to avoid organizing and starting to write the grant proposal that I plan to submit as soon as possible after I show up in Oxford. (I'll definitely be doing some work on that grant proposal this week...) Plus, I had gotten a couple of different e-mails about Legends from Autumn this week, so the fact that she's doing some work on this stuff also provided an important spark. Given that today's Sunday and no e-mails asking me to do stuff arrived, I figured that today was the day I should start organizing the new book.

There are a couple of tentative title possibilities. Personally, I am most fond of "Legends of Caltech IV: Or How I Learned to Stop Studying and Love the Ride". The other one I wrote down is "Legends of Caltech IV: The Finesse, The Brute Force, and the Flaming", but that one really doesn't flow at all (even if the idea itself isn't horrible). Any subtitle suggestions? My current idea for a cover is to make it like the poster of a grindhouse movie (i.e., a B movie).

I saw the signs (and they opened up my mind)

Last night, my life had one positive sign and another non-negative one. (By the way, I simply love how I'm using the word "sign" with positivity and non-negativity here... Sometimes it's really awesome how mathematical jargon mixes with the normal English usage of words.)

The (very!) positive sign was that I was finally feeling a strong urge to organize Legends of Caltech IV. I have been planning to write a rough outline for this. I intended to produce it when the third book came out, but I wasn't really in the mood to deal with it. In addition to that sudden urge, I was also in the mood to start contacting people to write or flesh out (depending on the story) the various stories Autumn and I know that we want to include in Legends IV. I didn't actually do any of these things last night, but the fact that I now want to start spending some time doing them is absolutely excellent news as far as my mental outlook on life is concerned. In particular, it means that the massive pain (in the ass) associated with producing Legends III is now starting to fade away to the extent that I am ready to start working on the next book now. I don't plan to dive into it completely yet, but I do want to get started. Autumn and I are definitely not going to start the clock for a while (we'll see where we are in a year), but right now I would say that the ETA is either May 2010 or May 2011 (depending on how strenuously we end up working on it).

The non-negative sign is that I played some Zelda: Twilight Princess last night. I haven't been playing that game or Super Paper Mario very much even though I would like to (because I've been doing other things). I made some nice progress on the 4th dungeon in Zelda last night. (Yes, I am only on the 4th dungeon even though I bought the game in March. I have twice gone more than a month without touching the game. This is certainly not my usual practice when it comes to Zelda games.)

By the way, please excuse the Ace of Base...