8.581: Entropy, Information and the Brain

January 1998

Welcome to the Homepage for Physics 8.581 in IAP 1998

Lecturers: William Bialek, NEC Research Institute and Zhaoping Li, Brain & Cognitive Sciences

Organizers: A. Nihat Berker and Mehran Kardar, Physics Department

Schedule: 9:30 to 11:30AM everyday during IAP, 1998; starting on January 5, in room 3-270.

Dr. Bialek will give 8 lectures on Mon-Thu of the first 2 weeks
He will conduct Recitations/Discussions on Fridays 1/9 and 1/16
Mon 1/19 is the Martin Luther King Holiday
Dr. Berker will give 2 lectures on Tue 1/20 and Wed 1/21
Dr. Kardar will give 2 lectures on Thu 1/22 and Fri 1/23
Dr. Li will give 4 lectures on Mon-Thu of the last week
There may (or may not) be a final Recitation/Discussion on Friday 1/30

Credit: This 12 unit course is primarily intended for graduate students in the Physics Department, and can be counted towards their breadth requirement. Grading of the course will be based on a number of problem sets.

Watch this space for any changes and new announcements: (Previous announcements)

Official registration procedure
Starting from 1/7/97, lectures are moved to room 12-132.
Final grades are now (2/4/98) available from the TAs in room 12-108.

Currently available handouts:

Course Announcement
Bialek's Lecture Outlines, and problem sets: Set #1 - Set #2 - Set #3/4 - Set #5 - Set #6, and their solutions
Kardar's problem set, and solutions, and paper on cortical maps.

Most of the links here are to postscript files. Your web browser should have an option to look at postscript files with a viewer (such as ghostview), or download them to your local machine (and from there you can send them to the printer ).

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