David Falk

I was David Falk's graduate student and co-author on several papers and the textbook for Physics 106, "Seeing the light: Optics in nature, photography, color, vision, and holography." This book was extremely helpful in my obtaining my earliest faculty offers and successful courses. He was intellectually open minded, supporting my thesis work that straddled physics and perceptual psychology. David was rigorous, and at times extremely critical, and while his approach was not appropriate...

I took two courses from Dr. Falk: Optics and waves in Spring 1972 and graduate statistical theormodynamics (replete with both "Platonic and non Platonic processes") in Fall 1973. Dr. Falk's informative lectures were full of amusing jokes and metaphors. He told us to treat the equations and theories of phsics as "toys" for our fun and amusement, and that we should make should to go home and "play with them". He sometimes lectured using overhead slides and he tended to move through them very...