Welcome to Gaia! ::

Oh, we don't get your fancy "technology". He, it's just good ol' blackboard for me. Though I've been making a couple of visual aids, which I think will help a lot. There are two key points in being able to construct this invariant:

1) Every knot/link has a Seifert surface, i.e. an oriented 2-manifold whose boundary is the knot/link; and
2) For basic manifolds, the first homology group is essentially the collection of loops in that manifold, with the equivalence (A + B)~C if there is some surface whose boundary is (A+B-C). (This becomes extremely formalized in algebraic topology, but I want to skip that part).

So what I'm doing for visual aids is taking a knot (string) and making its Seifert surface out of wrapping paper. Then I'm using more string for loops in the ambient space, and showing the aforementioned equivalence by making more surfaces that attach the loops together. I think it'll help a lot, especially since I can't draw.

Geodesic: Well, so far I'm signed up for classes in Real Analysis, GR, QFT, and philosophy of physics XD, with permission to sit in on grad and undergrad courses in algebraic topology, gauge theory and low-dim topology, and Riemannian geometry. What I do not have, as of yet, is a thesis advisor. I can has mathematical physicist who's not string theory or stat mech plz?

Speaking of which...Layra (or anyone): Any good recommendations for classical mathematical physics books? Invariance under Lie groups, symplectic geometry, all that good stuff?

I attended a creationist conference today.

Did you know the big bang was an explosion that came from nothing?

Keep your mumbo jumbo nonsensical, convoluted scientific concepts like "density" to yourself.

I just remembered this earlier today and thought it was funny. It's a list of Chuck Norris-like facts about my favorite professor ever:

Peter Arnold has a black belt in physics. He powers his home with cold fusion. He's recited all the digits of pi twice. He once yelled the heat equation at a door and it melted. He can find a simultaneous position and momentum eigenstate. He coined the concept of an annihilation operator (inspired by his ability to annihilate anything...with his mind). He can find an analytic solution to the exact uranium Schrodinger equation. He can calculate nuclear binding energies for large nuclei by hand (normally done using computational lattice QCD). He's traveled outside his lightcone. He lives in an absolute reference frame. He can find components of the dynamical variables for a massive particle in Fourier space that aren't on the mass shell. In 1945 he recited the equations governing nuclear fission - this is how WWII ended. Finally, he leaves black holes in his wake because that much ambient awesomeness must necessarily collapse under its own field to form a singularity.

I dread the day one does. I do not need to hear more puns on a day-to-day basis.

And counted to infinity..twice. And the chemical formula for Cyanide is CN, these are also Chuck Norris's Initials, and it is no coincidence.

I have a fun math problem for everyone.

sinx/n=?

it's a rather silly answer, but it's entertaining. (at least I think so anyway.)

@Layra-chan: My calc. 3 class is going to be using MATLAB this semester; however the system is having some problems that my teacher hasn't worked out yet, do you think you could help with solving the problem if you knew what it was? I only ask 'cause my teacher will take forever about fixing it, so if there's something I could do about it I'd like to do it...
Thanks
-tiki