Dr. David Craig
Associate Professor of Physics, WTAMU

NOTE: many of these pages are very old and will be updated soon (2018)

Greetings. I teach various physics classes at West Texas A & M University. I am in the Department of Chemistry and Physics.

Here is my new page on Color.

Resources for old classes:

• Optics TTVN Resource Area
• Math Methods TTVN Resource Area
• Modern Physics 2 Resources

Resources on introductory astrophysics:

• Astrophysics resource area
• Expansion and large scale structure A very brief look with links to minutephysics.

About me

Degrees:

• Rhodes College B.S. Physics, 1984.
• New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. M. S. Physics (Instrumentation Specialty), 1988.
• University of Mississippi Ph. D. Physics, 1995. I did most of my graduate work there at the National Center for Physical Acoustics.

Professional interests:

• Science education. I think introductory science course for all majors are very important.
• Astronomy. I work with the Undergraduate ALFALFA Team on mostly single-dish radio astronomy with the Arecibo Observatory.
• Computational Physics lately using Python, but I am also a long time fan of good ol' FORTRAN, the language of the elder gods.
• Mathematical typesetting with LaTeX, the professional's choice. You will grow old trying to write mathematics or physics in Equation Editor. The great Knuth is one of my heroes.

General intellectual interests:

• Computing: At work, I have the standard Apple running OS X, but I prefer Linux.
• Philosophy of Mathematics,Science as Data Compression, Algorithmic Complexity, along the lines of Gregory Chaitin's work (and many others). I am not a worker in this, just a very interested spectator.
• Ham Radio I hold Amateur Extra License AD5FG. I love cw. The best book about it is The Art and Skill of Radio Telegraphy.
• Odd specialty carpentry So far I have made frames for several small dobsonian telescopes, an amplified cigar box guitar, and a replica of a 15th century navigational traverse board.

Math test area

Testing math display in the browser here.

The Sturm-Liouville differential equation is

` [p(x) y']' + q(x) y - lambda w(x) y = 0. `