Paul Cook @ Caltech

Welcome to the physics website of Paul Cook, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, in the theoretical physics group.

I am currently studying towards a PhD degree in the field of string theory. My advisor is Prof. Hirosi Ooguri.

I did my undergraduate studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa, under the supervision of Prof. Robert de Mello Koch.

You can contact me at

Research and Teaching

I have thus far only one publication:
Cook, Paul L. H., Koch, Robert de Mello, Murugan, Jeff; Non-Abelian BIonic brane intersections; Phys. Rev. D 68, 126007 (2003), hep-th/0306250

I was a participant at the 2005 Theoretical Advanced Summer School (TASI), in Boulder, Colorado. I highly recommend it to any string theory graduate student!

As of the 2005/2006 academic year, I'll be a teaching assistant; for this year I'm teaching a section of second-year undergraduate general physics. I maintain the course website:
Physics 2 course information

Physics-Related Links

PlanetMath.org books, an (occasionally) useful collection of freely-available online mathematics textbooks.

A substantial list of review papers in all the different areas of string theory

Other links

Thought, a community and group of projects aimed at getting people thinking about improving the lives of those that need it most, primarily in South Africa.

Free High School Science Texts, a collaborative project based in South Africa, which is making excellent progress on writing a set of free, high quality textbooks for high school science students.

Thornhill Associates, administrators of custom online questionnaires.

Some game links: online play-by-mail chess; and for fans of Sudoku, a useful Sudoku solver, with description of the algorithm.