A kind of running diary and rambling pieces on my struggles with assorted books, classes, and other things, as they happen. You must be pretty bored to be reading this...
You know, it's funny. Objectively speaking, field theory really shouldn't be any harder than group theory, at least at the undergrad level. And yet while I can handle field theory stuff, I have a far easier time with group theoretic things. For instance, since we're now covering Galois theory, I've found the homeworks to be radically easier and more pleasurable - it's stuff about groups again, normality, solvability, commutator subgroups, and so on.
Weird, no?
You know what I love most about the net? It's that on the world wide Intarweb, nobody knows you're a dog.
Note to self: fill this in.
Visual Complex Analysis, by Tristan Needham -- an absolutely fantastic book, highest possible recommendation to anyone with calculus who likes pictures. Reads better than a novel.
The Way of Analysis, by Strichartz -- Heavy going at times, but recommended - real analysis is damn useful, and this book does a good job of presenting it.
Comprehensive Intro. to Differential Geometry, by Spivak -- beautiful, enlightening, highly recommended, but be warned, it is very challenging particularly for people like me who haven't had much prior exposure to highly rigorous texts.
Gauge Fields, Knots, and Gravity, by Baez and Munian -- another stunning, engrossing, entertaining book. It goes on a wild adventure ride, starting from Maxwell's Equations, to some differential geometry, to 'gauge fields' and the Yang-Mills equations, to knots, and then to general relativity. Simply outstanding.
Geometrical Methods of Mathematical Physics, by Schutz - just got this, to help me deal with Spivak's text. Looks good so far, but haven't read nearly enough to give a recommendation.
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