8.962 Class Home

8.962 General Relativity

Spring 2016

Instructor: Washington Taylor

TAs: Samuel Buck Johnson, Usman Naseer

Lecture: MW11-12.30 (56-154)
Recitation: M4:00 PM / F11:00 AM (26-328)

Information:

W. Taylor office hours: Mondays 1-2 PM, 6-317 (email wati at MIT, phone: 617-258-0729)

U. Naseer office hours: Tuesdays 4-5 PM,, room 8-320 (email unaseer at MIT)

S. Johnson office hours: Wednesdays 4-5 PM, room 8-320 (email samj at MIT)

Problem sets: Due weekly, Wednesdays by 9 PM in the homework box; late problem sets may be turned in by Friday 4 PM the same week for 2/3 credit. Lowest problem set grade will be dropped, so you can miss one problem set due to illness etc.

OCW archive available

Announcements

Recitation: friday 5/6

Dear GR,

This Friday I was thinking of talking about gauge theories in general, possibly covering how GR can be thought of as a gauge theory. Purely supplementary to the class; attend at your leisure.

Best,
Sam

Announced on 05 May 2016 7:23 p.m. by Samuel Buck Johnson

Recitation: friday 4/29

Dear GR,

There's a chance I won't be able to prepare a solid lecture for Friday's recitation, so if you decide to come, know that it may end up being a kind of office-hour style general discussion about the course. One thing I could potentially talk about is gauge theories and how they relate to the covariant derivative and GR. I may take a vote at the beginning of the recitation.

I was planning to talk about black holes in AdS, but there will be time in the future. We can also add an extra recitation later if there's demand.

Best, Sam

Announced on 28 April 2016 7:01 p.m. by Samuel Buck Johnson

Friday 4/7 recitation CANCELLED

Dear GR,

Although I would like to talk about gauge theories today, I just learned that my roommate of 5 years is defending his thesis tiday; as the time conflicts with our usual recitation, I am cancelling this week's Friday recitation.

I will see you all soon enough, but please don't show up at 26-328 expecting me today.

Best,
Sam

Announced on 08 April 2016 6:37 a.m. by Samuel Buck Johnson

Updated math references from recitation

Dear GR,

I have posted a slightly updated ver2 of my math notes from recitation. Today's recitation was a little rough, so I encourage people to skim the notes at least through p11 so they can see the material at their own pace and all in one place.

These notes include extended discussion about tensor products. In particular, I give a better answer to a question that came up in today's recitation: it is FALSE that every vector in a tensor product space can be written as a tensor product of two vectors, one drawn from each of the two original vector spaces. Please see the notes for more details on this. I did not want to leave anyone confused on this very fundamental point!

Best,
Sam

Announced on 14 March 2016 7:51 p.m. by Samuel Buck Johnson

Problem IV deferred

As announced in class, problem IV on problem set five is deferred to the next problem set since we have not yet covered all the needed material. A revised version of the problem set without this problem has been uploaded.

Announced on 14 March 2016 7:35 p.m. by Washington Taylor

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