My name is Evan. I recently retired after working nearly four decades as an engineer and marketing dude in Silicon Valley.

Math and physics were my favorite subjects in high school; I was a physics major in college. But after I started working, computers became the primary focus. Math and science retreated onto the back burner. Time permitting, I continued to read popularized accounts about science, attended public lectures and watched some videos. Since these things were usually aimed at a non-technical audience (i.e., no equations), they were more entertainment than true enlightenment. In other words, I regressed from an active (albeit an amateur) player to a passive spectator.

Retirement presented a golden opportunity to restart my science education. I definitely won’t become anything near an expert, not even a first-year graduate student. But, I do hope to become more knowledgeable in a few current topics, stuff like quantum entanglement, cosmology, numerical methods, and big data. It may take years to really get to where I want to be.  I look forward to the journey.

In addition to reading textbooks, doing the homework problems, writing computer programs and perhaps attending classes (on-line or in person), I will blog about the things I’m learning. The idea is “learning by explaining.” It mimics the process whereby an instructor learns a subject by teaching or explaining that subject.  The blog will incorporate graphs and equations whenever appropriate. To paraphrase Einstein, the equations will be as simple as possible, but no simpler. I will also post the Python source code used to generate the graphs and solve the equations.

The blog is primarily to help me, but perhaps others can learn something too.  Since I’m trying to learn the subject, the blog will have its share of errors. I make no warranties on the ultimate accuracy of the content.

I hope you will visit occasionally and find it worthwhile.

Acknowledgements:

Gravit Theme powered by WordPress
LaTeX rendered with Simple MathJax plugin.