Friday, March 18, 2011

Sidney Coleman's QFT lectures: TeX, PDF

E-mail from Bryan Chen

Dear Lubos,

It's been a few years since I wrote you. I thought you might be interested that the LaTeXing of Coleman's notes has had quite a bit of recent progress.  Indeed, the project was more or less stalled in 2008, until last year, when Ting Yuan Sen (a student at National University of Singapore and Ecole Polytechnique) began writing me that he was continuing the typesetting. Indeed, within a few months, he finished all the rest of the lectures!

Earlier this week, I wrote Brian Hill (who originally wrote the handwritten version), and at my request, he gladly contributed a short preface to the project, giving a bit of context to the notes, and I've compiled it with all the lectures into one 338 page PDF file.




The files are in the same place they've always been.  There are various readmes in that directory as well, saying basically the same things as this email:
www.physics.upenn.edu/~chb/phys253a/coleman
Here're the links to some specific files:

The PDF of the full notes (338 pages, Google Docs Viewer):
www.physics.upenn.edu/~chb/
phys253a/coleman/coleman.pdf
A convenient ZIP file containing the source files:
www.physics.upenn.edu/
~chb/phys253a/coleman/
coleman_latex_
source_20110314.zip
The TeX project should surely be improved with (at least) two more things, which I don't have the energy for:
  1. The formatting between lectures is rather inconsistent, especially with regard to "section" headings and the like.
  2. The lectures would benefit greatly from an index.
I'd appreciate it if you might spread the word on your blog!

Best,
Bryan



P.S. (by LM): Just to be complete, videos from the lectures are available at Harvard:
Physics 253: Quantum Field Theory: Lectures by Sidney R. Coleman
They cover both semesters, 253a and 253b, and were recorded in 1975-1976.