My Ph.D. Dissertation

Yesterday, my wife reorganized our lateral file cabinet and threw away things we no longer needed.

As a result of the cleaning, she accidentally made the bottom drawer non-operational :-). Since I won’t have time to fix it until after the November election, I decided to move everything out of that drawer.

That’s when I came across my Ph.D. dissertation (pictured below). It brought back fond memories of my time studying for my Ph.D. at Kansas State University. The dissertation is a collection of papers that were either published or accepted for publication. One of them, titled "A Simple Transformation for Nonlinear Waves," was initially accepted by the American Journal of Physics around 1994, if I recall correctly. I was asked to revise it by the editor-in-chief.

The American Journal of Physics is an excellent journal, and I was thrilled that my article was accepted. One of the professors in our department even mentioned that no one from his group had ever published in that journal. My article established a connection between sinusoidal and hyperbolic waves through the Sine-Gordon equation, based on a nonlinear transformation I discovered.

For a reason I will write it about later, I ended up publishing a version of the article on Physics Letters A in 1996. So far it has been cited 1,060 times per Google Scholar. I hope that I will have the time to revise the paper to have it finally published on the Journal of American Physics, maybe after retirement.