Physics in the classroom

Teaching

At Stanford, I was a teaching assistant for courses ranging from introductory physics to graduate general relativity. Drawing on that experience, I created an undergraduate general relativity course at the University of Maryland and taught it two winters in a row.

Undergraduate course

An Introduction to General Relativity

PHYS499G · University of Maryland
January 2025 and January 2026 · 1 credit

UMD course listing

This three-week course is for upper-level undergraduates who know multivariable calculus and basic mechanics. Starting from Newtonian kinematics and gravitation, we build up to the Einstein and geodesic equations through interactive lectures and exercises.

In-class exercise

What’s the longest word you can make from capital letters that are one-manifolds?

Imagine drawing each capital letter as a thin stroke. Smooth out any cusps, like the bend in G, and leave out the endpoints of open strokes. Which letters can you use?

A hint

Zoom in on any point of the letter. A small neighborhood should look like an open interval. That works all the way around an O. Try the same test where the three arms of a T meet.

See my word from class

I came up with COLUMNS. Can you beat seven letters?

A G drawn as a single open curve, an O drawn as a closed loop, and a T with its three-way junction marked. — Try the test on G, O, and T before you start building a word.

Final exam

Students teach the last class

For the final exam, each student chooses a spacetime, works out what its metric tells us, and gives a thirty-minute chalk talk on it to the class. Previous years have included gravitational wave metrics, rotating black holes, warp drives, expanding universes, and more.

A student gestures toward a black hole diagram on a chalkboard filled with equations. — A student explains the geometry of a rotating black hole during the PHYS499G final exam on January 21, 2026.