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What is AstroBaki

AstroBaki is a wiki for current and aspiring scientists to collaboratively build pedagogical materials such as videos, lecture notes, and textbooks. Textbooks in particular take a lot of work to write and get right. The more people that participate in the learning, teaching, and writing process, the better the result. And the fruits of this labor should be open and free, because science works by being open and free. Except for writing grants.

AstroBaki was inspired by the story of Nicolas Bourbaki. From the 1930s to the 70s, a bunch of French mathematicians got together and rewrote math collaboratively. No individual got to claim credit for the work (hence the psuedonym Bourbaki). The result was a set of useful pedagogical texts and a rejuvenation of math throughout France. Nicolas Bourbaki was a wiki ahead of its time.

The AstroBaki wiki augments the standard MediaWiki engine to accept LaTeX for rendering. The goal is for texts to be written in LaTeX for anyone to download, compile, and view, and for the very same LaTeX code to be rendered into HTML by the wiki engine for a reasonable viewing experience online. All of the standard wiki tools of collaborative writing, revision control, and attribution (if desired) apply to the LaTeX code.

This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, Grants 0901961 and 1352519.

Who is AstroBaki

In this section, we aim to acknowledge special contributors to this project. The edit history of documents on this wiki will record contributions for posterity, but in some cases, this is not enough. To more adequately acknowledge the hard work and generosity of members who have labored to put their work in the public domain here, we have the following list:

• Prof. Aaron Parsons, of the University of California, Berkeley
  • transcribed into latex (in the classroom, on the fly) the lectures for Radiative Processes in Astrophysics, Cosmology, Galactic Dynamics and Stellar Formation, Fluid Dynamics, and Order-of-Magnitude Physics
  • Summarized and distilled from lectures the summary for Interstellar Medium
  • authored Radio Astronomy: Tools and Techniques
  • Created this wiki, along with the MediaWiki extension that performs wholesale conversion of latex into MediaWiki syntax
  • is teaching the Spring 2025 Undergraduate Radio Lab
• Prof. Eugene Chiang, of the University of California, Berkeley
  • authored the original 26 lectures of Radiative Processes in Astrophysics
  • authored the original 22 lectures of Order-of-Magnitude Physics
• Prof. Chung-Pei Ma, of the University of California, Berkeley
  • authored the original 24 lectures of Cosmology
• Prof. Leo Blitz, of the University of California, Berkeley
  • authored the original 26 lectures of Galactic Dynamics and Stellar Formation
• Prof. Al Glassgold, of the University of California, Berkeley
  • co-taught with James Graham the 30 lectures from which the summary of the Interstellar Medium was drawn
• Prof. Eliot Quataert, of the University of California, Berkeley
  • authored Stellar Structure (transcribed by James McBride)
• Prof. James Graham, of the University of California, Berkeley
  • co-taught with Al Glassgold the 30 lectures from which the summary of the Interstellar Medium was drawn
  • authored the original 3 lectures of Fluid Dynamics
• Prof. Carl Heiles, of the University of California, Berkeley
  • authored the original labs and related hand-outs for the Undergraduate Radio Lab

Lectures and Materials

To start off AstroBaki, here are lecture notes from introductory graduate astrophysics classes, typed on-the-fly in class. They are coarse, poorly edited, and possibly incorrect in places (usually because of transcription error), but make up for that in sheer content. Though the elegance of the latex rendering (and writing) varies dramatically, there should be plenty of examples off of which contributors can base new contributions. Please add and edit!

• Radiative Processes in Astrophysics
• Relativistic Astrophysics and Cosmology
• Computational Astrophysics
• Cosmology
• Galactic Dynamics and Stellar Formation
• Fluid Dynamics
• Order-of-Magnitude Physics
• Interstellar Medium
• Introduction to Digital Signal Processing
• Radio 101
• Undergraduate Radio Lab
• Radio Astronomy: Tools and Techniques
• Stellar Structure
• Cosmological Statistics with an Emphasis on 21cm Cosmology
• Intro to Research Resources
• HYPERION
• Adrian Liu's Summer 2015 Global Signal Talks