Recent content by Newtime

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    How do you organize your papers?

    Wow. Thanks for the suggestions - I'll look into both.
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    How do you organize your papers?

    (Maybe this should be in general discussion?) As the title said: how do you organize your papers? I'm curious to hear what works from some academic veterans. I've been accumulating more and more papers and have since run into trouble finding certain ones. Do you sort by author, by...
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    Positronium Decay: Find Momentum of Gamma Rays

    Here's a first attempt: we use conservation of momentum and find |p_{\text{before}}|=|p_{\text{after}}| \Rightarrow 2\gamma m_0v =2\gamma h\nu / c \Rightarrow m_0v=h\nu/c = |p_i| for each gamma ray p_i where the last inequality is from a previous exercise which asks us to show this for each...
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    Positronium Decay: Find Momentum of Gamma Rays

    Homework Statement Consider positronium decay. Show the magnitude of the momentum for each gamma ray is m_0c where m_0 is the mass of the electron. Homework Equations E=\sqrt{p^2c^2+m^2c^4}, p=h\nu/v The Attempt at a Solution I'm not sure how to start this one, though I...
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    Doing math, but without actually understanding it

    Paul Halmos on studying math: "Don't just read it; fight it! Ask your own question, look for your own examples, dicover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate cases? Where does the proof use the...
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    Schools Undergrad Astronomy Safety Schools

    As in, you receive some sort of personal evaluation from each teacher? That's pretty intense. Although, if you're a good student, I would think that would work in your favor.
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    Strategies for Acing Math Tests

    Work problems: it will help build intuition and force you to learn the more important results since these are likely the ones you'll use in your proofs. Unless you feel you're behind, I wouldn't waste time trying to memorize definitions and theorems.
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    Schools Skipping Straight to Grad School (don't laugh)

    I read your whole post and it seems there's a very natural question to ask: why do you want to go to graduate school? Also, what makes you think the problems you had with your undergraduate education are not going to be there in graduate school? You will still be faced with terrible lectures...
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    Why is (0,1) not compact in topology?

    Note that \bigcup_{i=1}^{\infty} (1/n,1) is not a cover of [0,1] because neither 0 nor 1 are in this set.
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    NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

    So the impression I'm getting is that the NSF does want to see something detailed and well thought out. However, it seems like the reason for this is not so much that they expect you to know exactly what project you'll be working on, but so they know you can coherently and intelligently...
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    NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

    In the likely case this has been asked before, please direct me to the thread. I couldn't find it. Anyway, I was hoping to get some opinions on the proposed plan of research statement part of the NSF GRF application. I can't seem to get a consensus on what it should be. In particular, does...
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    Is there a way to construct an open set whose boundary is A?

    I figured it out. For anyone else stuck on this question: if A is a closed nowhere dense set, consider the set X-A.
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    Is there a way to construct an open set whose boundary is A?

    Homework Statement Prove: a set in a topological space is closed and nowhere dense if and only if it is the boundary of an open set.Homework Equations Basic definitions of closed, nowhere dense, open and boundary.The Attempt at a Solution One direction is easy. Let A \subset X be a subset in...
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