On the left, a portrait of Pierre Simon Laplace, and on the right, Joseph Fourier . Fourier was a mathematician and physicist - his work was on heat flow. Wikipedia gives him credit for "discovering" the greenhouse effect, among other things- but obviouly his work turned out to have many other applications too, as we will see this week. These scientists worked around the turn of the 19th century, roughly the same era that the early theories of static electromagnetism (the subject of much of this semester) was being developed. Maxwell's unifying work wasn't till the middle of the 1800's.

Up through (and beyond) the early 1800's there was almost complete (and explicit) exclusion of women from higher education (in Europe and the US), hence the unfortunate and rather outrageous gender bias in this cast of characters...

(Images from the Dibner Portrait site.)

Week 6 (Feb 18 -Feb 22):

Special notes:

• There is a Preflight #6 (Password is always 3310) due MONDAY at noon! (Link is now working)
  
  
• Next homework is HW 6. HOMEWORK 6 due date is extended 2 days to Friday (Feb 22) - you may turn it in Wed if you want, but it's not required. Feel free to use the extra 2 days! (HOWEVER, this means you won't get them back till 1 day before the exam. I will post solutions Friday afternoon as usual, though)

  PLEASE NOTE: Homework 7 will be back on schedule. It is already posted in the "calendar" link (upper left).
  
  

• Check out vector fields in 2D electrostatics ,(this was the pretty cool one we looked at in class on Friday) or 3D , or another (emstatic) in 2D.
• Please visit our piazza site. Some of you are starting to post questions (and responses) there, thanks! (The more who do that, the more useful it becomes to the rest of us.)
  
  
• Do you know about "Beyond Boulder"? It's every Thursday, 5 PM (11th floor, with pizza!) It's for undergrads (Astro and physics), designed to focus on what comes after graduation (tips, career ideas, research opportunities, etc). Every week is different. This week is on "Careers", with outside guest speakers. See http://beyondboulder.pbworks.com for details each week.
• Video lectures:here.
  
  
• Society of Physics students has pizza and socializing on the 11th floor of the tower Wed at 5 PM all this term. Check it out!
  
• We have a D2L (learn.colorado.edu) site - I post homework solutions there (and also at Piazza)
  
  

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  OLDER Webpages, for reference and old links: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5,
  
  

I welcome your comments on the class and this website. Send them to steven.pollock at colorado.edu
(Thanks to Prof. Chuck Rogers for many of our home page image ideas!)