Phys 50 quotes - Andrˇs C.

"You'll sell your soul for a solution, basically."
     --giving an overview of the course

"Special functions are like a zoo. You eventually can tell the difference
between zebras and gazelles, and learn to choose zebras and gazelles. But
you have to work with them. You have to feed them."

"Einstein did this when he was in high school."
     --about a homework problem

"Some dummy puts 'up,' that's all they can put, you put 'silon,' they
challenge it, they lose their turn! It's not a great use for an s, but...."

"Another example of North-South imperialist hegemony."
     --explaining clockwise

"All this is going to be necessary 'cause we're going to try to figure out
how rainbows look."
     --introducing complex analysis

"This is like spin, or your hand in belly dancing."
     --explaining multiply-valued functions

"'Hey now.' You ever watch that show?"

"I bought twenty boxes."
     --handing out Girl Scout Cookies

"That's Cauchy calling."
     --when the phone rang

"That's how I'm blowing up."

"You have to respect the branch cut."

"The impression I had grading the homework is that you reached your
breaking point."

"People were too eager to massage the answer right away."

"Which one do you want? The straighforward one? The one that's not clever?"

"Isn't this innovative teaching?"
     --on having us grade our tests with him

"I could write it the same way as before but that would be like chewing
food for you."

"See how arbitrary this is? This is how you are graded."
     --to Neil while knocking points off his test

"You can't tell from the picture, but I'm doing an asymptotic series right
there. Really. I am."
     --five minutes later, holding up a photo of him in tank top and shorts
sitting on a ledge under a tree on a sunny day

Mark: "I was just scratching the pencil on the paper late into the night."
Andres: "Oh I remember those days, isn't that wonderful? I remember when I
first realized I wanted to go into physics, I was doing a problem on the
Doppler shift of a reflection off a mountain. I worked on that problem all
night, and I still did not get the answer. When the sun rose, I realized,
'This is for me.'"

"The great thing about making a calculation is that you can do as many
calculations as you want."

Andres: "'What is that thing?' That's a letter!"
     --after Charles asked about a xi on the board

"That's the great thing about infinity. There's no top."

"I get my body into it, I guess that's what I'm saying. My body remembers
the equations."

"How do you stop these generalized hypergeometric series from being infinte
series? Do you scold them? 'Do not go off to infinity! Bad boy!'"

"Do you see the constellation of the history of physics?"
     --no particular context

"So right before you die you can be calculating, 'So this is a Bessel
function...'"
     --alluding to Poe

"YES. STUDY TILL YOU DROP DEAD! OVER THE SUMMER! No I don't usually do that."
     --contemplating class during reading week

"Well then. Let's get on to the railway."
     --moving to a new example

"How does a circle look?"

"I have completely reversed your perceptions of reality."

"So the class that's going on there would say 'Of course we can have both
roots.'"
     --describing the hollow earth theory (with diagrams)

"Let me be polite about this. _Where the hell did you pull that one out from?_"
     --to Charles

"Let's say you decide that ten cosines is not enough to reproduce a
waveform so it sounds pleasing to the eye."

"I think I could do anything besides music. Given ten years I think I could
master anything. But I don't think I could be a good musician. I recognize
my limitations."

"I guess, then, I would write this more suggestively..."

"So the solution is little j of l--so cute, eh? little j..."

"You can tell this guy was a real nerd. 'Hankel.' 'Hey Hankel!'"

"Infinite forces are kind of unphysical."

"Also it reminds me of Dino. The Flintstones."
     --doing Dini series

"Iteration always works."
     --last day of class