About

February 21st, 2010

Well, did you find the right Byung Kyu Park? I am a physics graduate student at University of California, Berkeley.

If it sounds right, my contact information is below, and my schedule is here. Some personal pictures (from research-related trips, family and relatives, coworkers, etc.) can be found here.

Guiding principles

A short list of axioms (which, as much as I hope are original, are probably derivative):

  • “If I cannot remember it, it could not have been important.”
  • When in doubt, declare victory“: or success.
  • “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” —John Galt
  • “Check your premises” —Francisco d’Anconia; this is applicable to a wide variety of situations.

Personal demons

Following are the mathematical operations that I am scared of because I never really understood them, even though I should have by now:

  • Legendre transform: comes up most often in stat mech, one of my weakest subject.
  • Contour integral in the complex plane: In the class that I should’ve learned this (Math 185, complex analysis), I never learned how to actually use it, and in classes I need to use this (various physics courses), I never seem to learn them in a way I can understand them at all.

Self-censorship

A short list of words and phrases (hopefully) you won’t see me saying:

  • “trivial”: Too many use this word to weasel out of a potentially messy proofs. It’s also insulting and disrespecting to the students. When I don’t want to give a detailed explanation, I will instead use “nontrivial”.
  • qualifications to “American” in reference to myself: I am a United States citizen with full rights and privileges (minus eligibility for presidency or vice presidency). I don’t need to qualify what kind of American I am.

Groups I belong to

Currently I am a member of

Contact me

Please use my public key to encrypt the message. You can also get this key from your nearest public key server (key ID: 891B41C8).

You can send the encrypted message by email to: a...@bkpark.com

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