Byung Kyu Park's Personal Website

Well, did you find the right Byung Kyu Park? I am a physics graduate student at University of California, Berkeley.

If it sounds right, my contact information is below.

Guiding principles

A short list of axioms (which, as much as I hope are original, are probably derivative):

• “If I cannot remember it, it could not have been important.”
• “When in doubt, declare victory“: or success.
• “Check your premises” —Francisco d’Anconia; this is applicable to a wide variety of situations.
• “Nowhere does quantum mechanics license violation of energy conservation” —David Griffiths, in Introduction to Quantum Mechanics; claims of violation of energy and momentum conservation (under any situation) amounts to heresy—one that Niels Bohr was too frequently guilty of.
• “Mathematics is too important to be left to the mathematicians.” —David Hestenes, Oersted Medal Lecture 2002

Personal demons

Following are the mathematical operations that I am scared of because I never really understood them, even though I should have by now:

• Legendre transform: comes up most often in stat mech, one of my weakest subject.
• Contour integral in the complex plane: In the class that I should’ve learned this (Math 185, complex analysis), I never learned how to actually use it, and in classes I need to use this (various physics courses), I never seem to learn them in a way I can understand them at all.
  I’m cautiously taking this off the list, as I think I at least understand what this is good for: deriving integral formulas for definite integrals of real functions.

Self-censorship

A short list of words and phrases (hopefully) you won’t see me saying:

• “trivial”: Too many use this word to weasel out of a potentially messy proofs. It’s also insulting and disrespecting to the students. When I don’t want to give a detailed explanation, I will instead use “nontrivial”.
• qualifications to “American” in reference to myself: I am a United States citizen with full rights and privileges (minus eligibility for presidency or vice presidency). I don’t need to qualify what kind of American I am.

Groups I belong to

Currently I am a member of

• Budker group at UC Berkeley and, naturally, American Physical Society
• Free State Project. At the moment I have my eyes on this page.

Contact me

Please use my public key to encrypt the message. You can also get this key from your nearest public key server (key ID: 891B41C8).

You can send the encrypted message by email to: a...@bkpark.com