Please update your links to my new "official" page at: http://math.mit.edu/~stevenj/.

Who am I?

Me

Hello, my name is Steven Johnson. As of May 18, 2001, I became a post-doctoral associate in theoretical physics at at MIT, after 6 years as a graduate student there. Before that, I received three undergraduate degrees from MIT: in physics, mathematics, and computer science. I am also an alumnus of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA), which was a pretty cool place.

This is my ancient web page, much of which (e.g. the garish background) is rooted in 1994 (when NCSA Mosaic was still the dominant browser and background GIFs were an exciting new feature of Netscape 1.0).



Research and Theses

My research advisor is Professor John Joannopoulos, who heads the Ab Initio Materials Group in the condensed-matter theory division of the physics department. I work primarily on photonic crystals, when I'm working and not goofing off.

The first chapter of my doctoral thesis gives a colloquial, non-technical, and (hopefully) entertaining introduction to my research. My entire thesis has now been published as a hardcover book by Kluwer (sans color, unfortunately); it is also available from Amazon.

You can also find information on my undergraduate physics thesis (in quantum chaos), for the curious.

Free Software

Sometimes, I pretend to be a computer scientist: I collaborated with Matteo Frigo of the Laboratory for Computer Science to develop the Fastest Fourier Transform in the West.

I've also released a free software package, called MIT Photonic-Bands (MPB) for doing computations related to electromagnetism and photonic crystals.


I am trying to make some photos 'n things available to my adoring public. I recently got a digital camera, but haven't gotten around to posting anything from it yet, sorry.


To reach me, you can try one of the following:


Here is a list of interesting stuff that I have found. (Really out of date, mostly broken links.)