To Fellow NFLSers, I have always been skeptical about those who come to our school and share their experiences about their success. To claim to be successful seem to say one has finished his or her business in life, a very dire notion to me. For only 10 years have I graduated from NFLS, and…

Consider the cost of a textbook and the amount of information I get from a textbook. Then consider the amount of information I get from Wikipedia. Do the maths. I realize how much I owe Wikipedia and how little I actually pay for it. PS. The letter from Wikipedia always has a personal touch to…

Michelangelo: Precedents, Innovations, Influence is a choice out of pure curiosity. I was just back from my first trip to France and Germany. Things I saw there pointed me to Italy. Since I know nothing about Italian arts except for the names, so I figured I’d better do my homework before the visit. When I…

Ian Morrison has a very simple goal for his class. He wishes his students find a good question, whose answer wins a student a Nobel Prize, and who mentions “this instructor”. As I am in the process of searching for a worthy research question for my independent career, his emphasis on finding a good question…

Jobs applied only to Reed College, a liberal arts school in Oregon. He got in, but then dropped out after a year. He learned typography there, which was among many dots he connected in designing the Mac. He went to India and stayed there for seven months to practice Zen, and had kept his practice…

“Here is to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently. They are not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing…

Reading the book is an inspiring experience. Among many things about Jobs that fascinate me, four of them made me think the most: motivation, innovation, being at the intersection of liberal arts and technology, and building a team of A-players. On Motivation: Personal ambition certainly was one factor: in his twenties, “Jobs confided in Sculley…

Spaepen covered six parts in his class Solids: Structure and Defects: 1) type of bonding, 2) formal description of structure, 3) diffraction, 4) phase equilibria, 5) structure and stability of metallic phases, and 6) defects. In doing so, he managed to combine related topics in crystallography, X-ray diffraction, thermodynamics, and metallurgy in a single course.…

I was expecting courses of the highest quality when I started looking for courses to audit last fall. After two semesters, I am supremely satisfied. The two courses I audited in fall were Introduction to Solid State Physics by Federico Capasso and Solids: Structures and Defects by Frans Spaepen. Two in the spring were Introduction…

Being a restless person, I always feel the need to do something.  I recently read a quote by Abraham Lincoln:  “And in the end it’s not the years in your life that count. It is the life in your years.” It sort of provides a nice rationale (or excuse) for my restlessness. But like all…