

Landau's Theoretical Minimum (2002) - mikevm
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0204295v1

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mikevm
Reading how hard it was for Boris to pass Landau's theoretical minimum makes
me feel ashamed when I realize how much we students used to whine when a
professor gave a slightly more difficult ("unfair") exam.

I wonder how test procedures differed in the Soviet Union from those in the
US/Europe at that time.

~~~
javajosh
I took upper-division quantum from one of Landau's grad students, who was by
that time (the 90's) an old man. I don't remember his name, but he spoke with
a thick Russian accent and _also_ had a bad lisp. It was a very difficult
course, but for all the wrong reasons: it was very hard to understand him, and
it was all math technique, and very little of the things I personally like to
do when understanding stuff, like exploring simple pedagogical examples where
terms fall away, visualizing of different cases, etc. The course felt very
_Soviet_ in nature. Rigorous, but also mechanical, technical, and unrelenting.
The tests were epic in length and difficulty. The lectures were basically him
starting on the upper left of the board and continuing until he hit the lower
right, some 90 minutes later. There was very little class participation.

It was a truly horrible experience for me, an unfortunate waste of time and
resources. I squeaked out a C, (which was actually a pretty good grade), but I
truly didn't take anything away from it except fancy, esoteric math tools that
might have helped me had I gone into theoretical physics, which was never my
goal.

