I m a doctor! Not the usual kind of doctor, but blood, sweat, and tears were certainly involved. In 2020, I graduated from UC Berkeley with my bachelor s degree and wrote a blog post summarizing my undergrad years. Finishing grad school has been a similar transitional event in my life, but also one which many fewer Continue reading Tales from five years as a Caltech Physics PhD student
The ideal gas law is , where is the pressure, is the volume, is the number of particles, , and is the temperature. It constitutes one of the simplest and most applied equations of states in all of physics, and is (or will become) incredibly familiar to any student of not only physics but also Continue reading Deriving the Ideal Gas Law: A Statistical Story
Email: computerchesscup2021@gmail.comGithub repository: https://github.com/NicholasRui/chessbattleSubmission deadline: 31 January 2021 28 February 2021 (see extension email image below), 11:59 pm. Premise: Build a chess robot in python. Compete with other chess robots. Win the title of best chessed. Sign-up Instructions: You can either design a chess-playing bot by yourself or with one partner.…
The last few months have been devastating to our societies, our economies, and our ability to get out of bed before attending meetings. In anticipation of the tumultuous days that inevitably lie immediately ahead, I wanted to get out some thoughts about the pandemic. COVID-19 is, among many other things, a collection of big numbers—more Continue reading COVID-19 in the USA, Measured in Tragedies
After recently having graduated with a physics and astrophysics degree at the University of California, Berkeley, I can finally fulfill a long-awaited desire to write down a reflection of my college experiences with some sort of satisfying completeness. In writing this reflection, I hope to achieve two broad goals: (1) to view my experiences with Continue reading Tales from Berkeley Undergraduate…
Over my two-week vacation before I returned to Berkeley for the summer, I read Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky s The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics. This book was based on the first course in a series of courses called the Theoretical Minimum, taught by Leonard Susskind at Stanford targeted at curious Continue reading The Squishy Pendulum
When I was younger, I would occasionally hear about higher math classes that one was able to take. To me, then a naïve high schooler, AP Calculus represented an attainable pinnacle of mathematical knowledge beyond which lie a plethora of weird maths to explore. I had heard of multivariable calculus, which sounded like more of Continue reading Linear Algebra and Quantum Mechanics
Recently, one of my good friends was telling me about her final project in an introductory programming class for physics. She and her partner created a game in the style of tic-tac-toe, with opposing sides, black and white, placing markers on a grid until one side creates a line of five pieces in a row: Continue reading Convolutions and the Game of Life
Vector calculus is an extremely interesting and important branch of math with very relevant applications in physics. Specifically, vector calculus is the language in which (classical) electromagnetism is written. It is fascinating to me that Maxwell s equations can so succinctly and elegantly express so many phenomena, from electric and magnetic interactions to light (electromagnetic waves).…