Google made my day

This made my day when I found it a few weeks back, so I hope you’ll forgive my sharing my enjoyment. According to Google Scholar, my book with Ike Chuang is one of the ten most cited physics books of all time. Here’s Google’s list (I omit one book, the math text by Kato which has unaccountably escaped into the physics category):

  • J. D. Jackson, Classical Electrodynamics
  • Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature
  • S. M. Sze, Physics of Semiconductor Devices
  • Charles Kittel, Introduction to Solid State Physics
  • C. W. Allen, Astrophysical Quantities
  • H. S. Carslaw, Introduction to the Mathematical Theory of the Conduction of Heat in Solids
  • P. R. Bevington, D. K. Robinson, and G. Bunce, Data Reduction and Error Analysis for the Physical Sciences
  • H. Schlichting and K. Gersten, Boundary-Layer Theory
  • P. M. Morse and H. Feshbach, Methods of Theoretical Physics
  • Michael A. Nielsen and Isaac L. Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information

There’s many caveats. Google’s citation coverage is incomplete, they seem to double count some citations, and so on. And, of course, it’s not even clear what citation counts mean. Still, this brought a smile to my face; it’s enduringly pleasing to have done something that other people have apparently found quite useful.

8 comments

  1. Would you consider working on the 2nd edition? That would make an already awesome book perfect.

  2. grad student: thankyou for the compliment! I’m afraid I no longer work on quantum computing, and certainly won’t be working on a second edition.

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