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Sanjoy Mahajan ^[1]

Sanjoy Mahajan, ^[2]
a British American physicist, mathematician, electrical engineer and computer scientist ^[3]. He is associate professor of applied science and engineering at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering and visiting associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before, he was a physics lecturer at the University of Cambridge, with interests in improving physics and mathematics teaching and in writing textbooks, supported by the Gatsby Charitable Trust. Sanjoy Mahajan holds a B.Sc. in physics from Stanford University in 1990, and a Ph.D. in physics in 1998 from California Institute of Technology, where his advisors were Sterl Phinney, John Hopfield and Carver Mead. The thesis included theoretical biophysics, probabilistic number theory, and a draft textbook on order-of-magnitude physics ^[4]. He is author of Street-Fighting Mathematics ^[5] and The Art of Insight in Science and Engineering ^[6].

Bill

During the mid and late 80s, along with Kai-Fu Lee, Sanjoy Mahajan co-authored the at that time world class Othello program Bill ^[7], initially written in Common Lisp at Carnegie Mellon University in 1985, in 1986 rewritten in C and in 2005 released under the GPL ^[8]. Bill 3.0 applied Bayesian learning of discriminant functions that automatically combines evaluation features ^[9] ^[10].

Selected Publications

Kai-Fu Lee, Sanjoy Mahajan (1990). The Development of a World Class Othello Program. Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 43, No. 1
Sanjoy Mahajan (1998). Order of Magnitude Physics - A Textbook with Applications to the Retinal Rod and to the Density of Prime Numbers. Ph.D. thesis, California Institute of Technology, advisors Sterl Phinney, John Hopfield and Carver Mead, pdf

Sanjoy Mahajan (2001). A Radical Experiment in Mathematics Teaching. pdf
Sanjoy Mahajan (2001). Physics students learn nothing, so try history of science. pdf
Sanjoy Mahajan (2001). Learning proof and questioning lies. pdf
Sanjoy Mahajan (2002). Estimating light bending using order-of-magnitude physics. pdf
Sanjoy Mahajan (2004). Physics Education Research: Or it’s so hard to find good help these days. arXiv:physics/0405006
Sanjoy Mahajan, David W. Hogg (2004). Introductory physics: The new scholasticism. arXiv:physics/0412107
Sanjoy Mahajan, Richard R. Hake (2005). Is it finally time for a physics counterpart of the Benezet–Berman math experiment of the 1930’s? arXiv:physics/0512202v1 ^[13]
Sanjoy Mahajan (2005). Estimating gas mileage: An example of order-of-magnitude physics. arXiv:physics/0512209
Sanjoy Mahajan (2007). Teaching for transfer. arXiv:0704.1854