Susmit Islam > Recent Status Updates

This book is a remarkable second resource to have whenever formally studying SR/GR or QFT, plus a lot of mathematical physics. Delivers a lot of conceptual and philosophical insights behind the standard mathematical formalism of modern physics. Every time I come back to this book I always find some rather delectable foods for thought.

I see that it's a polarising book from the reviews and my hunch is that it's due to the fact that it won't be very helpful for a traditional topology course either in point-set topology or in algebraic (or even geometric) topology. After getting thru chapter 1, my impression is that it seems promising.

In particular, I loved how elegantly he derives the Cauchy-Riemann equations from the simple observation that an analytic function must not in any way involve complex conjugation, i.e. the partial derivative of a complex function f(z) = f(x, y) = f((z+z*)/2, (z-z*)/2) = f(z, z*) wrt z* must be 0 which I haven't seen elsewhere. This and the linear algebraic version are my fav proofs of the CR equations now.

Similar to what Chen's _Napkin_ does for maths, this book presents our best physical theories without significantly dumbing them down. The target audience seems to be a "mathematically experienced" (not necessarily _mature_) reader, as even I with my extensive background struggled with some parts. Contains some wonderful insights haven't seen elsewhere. Using it so far to supplement my differential geometry studies.