Last night I graded the exam for my advanced string theory course, computed the final grades, and will enter them into the System today. Hurrah! It was a fun class to teach, maybe even to learn (you’ll have to ask them). The final exam took me most of Sunday to write and LaTeX carefully, checking for typos since there were a few “show this” type questions where I gave a complicated expression that they had to derive. In the end, there were bits of F-theory, type IIB string theory, T-duality with D-branes, and a D-brane probe computation. Pretty easy in the end even if the student was only half awake for the course, especially since I gave them 48 hours to do it as a take-home.
I’m getting soft.
-cvj
Thanks for the tip! I do make it a point to skim hep-th after I’m done checking cond-mat for the topics I need to know about for my day job. When I see review articles, lecture notes or the like, I read until something comes up which my lack of background knowledge makes me puzzle over (“Why does that naturally follow from that?“), at which point my list of Stuff to Learn grows an item longer, and I start chasing into the bibliographies.
Ele,
Yes, but they can end up a lot harder as an exam since one has to work out something to give the student that can’t be just looked up online, etc. In a class exam you have a more predictable set of parameters to work with…things are more straightforward on both sides… Take homes mean a lot of extra work for the examiner, but you can end up testing ability and thinking skills more fairly for a wider group of types of student so I agree that overall it is a good way of doing things…. Overall….
-cvj
Blake Stacey – hurrah for ADE!
Seriously though, most people learn in the field by reading review papers, lecture notes, etc. Look out for those. Often, the big schools of the year will have people launching thei note for them some several months later… TASI, Trieste, Cargese, etc… Search on those terms on spires…
-cvj
I have 2 questions about the academic sociology of string theory: How many string theorist are there now? Roughly how many academic positions are there for string theorists?
I’ve come to really appreciate take home exams; it greatly reduces test anxiety, and allows me to craft an answer. Elegant thought is not cheap, and even an easy question can be answered better with a bit of consideration.
Thanks! I keep running into topics where I realize I need to know more string theory than I do in order to follow what’s been done recently (ADE classifications, for example), so at some point, I’m going to have to plow ahead into the subject.
Various notes I made from various sources on non-critical string theory and non-perturbative models (the first 1/4 of the course), and then my book for the remaining 3/4.
Cheers,
-cvj
Out of curiosity — my apologies in advance if you’ve already mentioned this and I missed it — what texts are you using for your advanced string theory course?