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So this is why Mermin and Ashcroft's Solid State Physics has been one of the standard graduate texts for the field since it was published in '76. According to

So this is why Mermin and Ashcroft's Solid State Physics has been one of the standard graduate texts for the field since it was published in '76. According to Wikipedia Lev Landau ranked physicists on a log scale - Newton was 0, Einstein 1 and Mermin placed himself on the scale at a 4.5

mechanical_fish 18y ago
To call Ashcroft and Mermin the standard text is actually to understate its awesomeness. That book saved my bacon in grad school, more than once. Ashcroft has a rather different personality from Mermin, but he's also a great lecturer. I took his graduate stat mech class. Man, do I wish there were videos of that, or at least a textbook.
- kurtosis 18y ago
  Whoa, that's awesome! My advisor got to take Emag from J.D. Jackson himself - Taking a course from the author of a famous text is truly the kind of thing that you get permanent bragging rights about.
  - mechanical_fish 18y ago
    I have a (rather battered) signed copy of Jackson. Some friends of mine in grad school heard he was coming to town for some physics seminar, so we all went to the Ithaca airport, waited for him to come in, and got his autograph. Man, was that my all-time personal peak of geekiness. Jackson himself was quite bemused. If we're going to name-drop great physics teachers and texts, though, let me recommend Roald Hoffman. His course in bonding in solids was my favorite science course ever -- and he even wrote a book! ("Solids and Surfaces") It was the highest-numbered course in the chemistry department -- the one where chemistry and physics become aspects of the same thing -- and he used a deliberately simplified but intuitively clear computational model and a great many examples to give you a mental picture of how bonding works, and how band structure is a special case of chemical bonding. One of these days I've got to reread that book. Amusingly, I signed up and took Hoffman's course without even knowing, at the time, that the guy had won a Nobel prize and hosted a PBS series. Cornell could work that way sometimes. (God, textbooks are criminally priced. I just discovered that my copy of Solids and Surfaces is worth $100, used, on Amazon. That's awful. As if recommending graduate-level science textbooks wasn't hard enough...)

mechanical_fish 18y ago

To call Ashcroft and Mermin the standard text is actually to understate its awesomeness. That book saved my bacon in grad school, more than once. Ashcroft has a rather different personality from Mermin, but he's also a great lecturer. I took his graduate stat mech class. Man, do I wish there were videos of that, or at least a textbook.

kurtosis 18y ago
Whoa, that's awesome! My advisor got to take Emag from J.D. Jackson himself - Taking a course from the author of a famous text is truly the kind of thing that you get permanent bragging rights about.
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  I have a (rather battered) signed copy of Jackson. Some friends of mine in grad school heard he was coming to town for some physics seminar, so we all went to the Ithaca airport, waited for him to come in, and got his autograph. Man, was that my all-time personal peak of geekiness. Jackson himself was quite bemused. If we're going to name-drop great physics teachers and texts, though, let me recommend Roald Hoffman. His course in bonding in solids was my favorite science course ever -- and he even wrote a book! ("Solids and Surfaces") It was the highest-numbered course in the chemistry department -- the one where chemistry and physics become aspects of the same thing -- and he used a deliberately simplified but intuitively clear computational model and a great many examples to give you a mental picture of how bonding works, and how band structure is a special case of chemical bonding. One of these days I've got to reread that book. Amusingly, I signed up and took Hoffman's course without even knowing, at the time, that the guy had won a Nobel prize and hosted a PBS series. Cornell could work that way sometimes. (God, textbooks are criminally priced. I just discovered that my copy of Solids and Surfaces is worth $100, used, on Amazon. That's awful. As if recommending graduate-level science textbooks wasn't hard enough...)