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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 y

• 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...)