My name is Bojan Tunguz and I was born in Sarajevo,
Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1992 my family escaped the war and moved to Croatia,
and that same year I came to the United States.
In 1993 I enrolled in Stanford University,
where I obtained a B.S. in
Physics
and an M.S. in
Applied Physics.
My Ph.D. Work (also in Physics) I have done at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
During my years in America I have moved around a lot, and so
far I have lived in six different states - Rhode Island, California,
Indiana, Illinois, Hawai'i and Tennessee. I currently live in Greencastle,
Indiana, but I am also back at Stanford where I currently do research as a Visiting Scholar at
HEPL.
Over the years I've also taught at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN, at DePauw University in Greencastle, IN, and at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, IN.
Physics
has been one of my big passions for a long time. It
is a challenging and demanding field, but I find it
very exciting and rewarding. Doing Physics is not a
line of work where one can expect any immediate gratification.
It is a long distance endeavor.
As an offshoot of my interest in Physics I have developed
naboj.com, a webstite that
aggregates article abstracts from
arXiv preprints repository.
Naboj.com is designed to allow
for a real-time evaluation of scientific papers.
My experience as an international student and faculty at various US
colleges and universities has led me to creation of Interedupedia,
a Wiki-like resource for international students who are seeking
admission to various educational institutions. Most of this information
is hard to find, and I thought that making it available and editable at a
single place would greatly help international students with their
application process.
Besides
Physics, I have many other intellectual interests. My
Catholic faith is the single most important thing in
my life, and I try to learn as much about it as possible.
I especially like reading and discussing theology. You
can find a list of theological works that I have most
benefited from here.
I have a strong interest in Psychology, and I try to get myself
as informed as possible on that subject. Currently I am reading a few
introductory textbooks. I am also a big fan of writings of
Oliver Sacks and Steven Pinker
I
am an avid reader, and I enjoy a good book of fiction.
One of my favorite contemporary writers is Haruki
Murakami, and I am almost done with reading all
of his works. The other writers that I enjoy reading
are Milan Kundera, Graham
Greene, Vladimir Nabokov,
Juan Rulfo, Jorge
Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes,
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Meša
Selimovi?, Miljenko Jergovi?,
Italo Calvino,and many, many
others. I am also interested in current affairs, all branches of science and technology, and
many other subjects. I read widely, and a few years ago I startd writing reviews of books I
read and posting them on Amazon. You can read those reviews here.
The long-haired picture of me at my homepage was taken by
Jessica Cohen all the way back in
1995. Jessica is a good friend of mine from Stanford and a very talented and versatile
artist. Like a lot of Physics majors I have gone through a phase when I grew my hair
long. In fact, I had gone through it twice, once in highschool and once in college. You
could say that I have outgrown that style now.
A little clip of me telling the
"Bee Joke"
was also taken in the latter part of 1995. As
you might have guessed, there is a story behind it as well. (WARNING: Plot details
revealed. This might be a great opportunity to
see the joke if you have not done so
already.) The particular gesture and vocalization that the little bee makes at the end
of the joke are in fact very commonly used in Croatia. They are somewhat
purposefully ambiguous and could mean something like "eh, you wish you knew," or
"wouldn't you like to know?" It works as a purposeful question-avoidance
strategy. So
the joke actually makes fun of it. (Yes, the "Bee Joke" is a real joke; I did not make
it up.) When I went to college there were many opportunities to use that particular
gesture, but I realized that it would be completely lost on my American friends.
One day as a bunch of us were waiting for a CalTrain in San Francisco, a fiendish plan
dawned upon me: I would tell the joke completely out of context, so the gesture would
become associated with the joke, not the other way around. Either that or I was just
being silly and telling a random Croatian joke that would lose a lot in translation.
The universal dumbfoundedness of my friends only encouraged me more, so I
started
telling it more, and soon enough both the joke and I were becoming infamous.
If you get to know me, you would soon enough notice that I am madly in love with
Sharmin. She makes me laugh,
a favor which I do more than a fair share of reciprocating. Even though I love her (madly), she still manages
to retain her poise and composure. Being calm under pressure is, in fact, one of her
more salient virtues.
I have started writing a blog, but my updates there are not all
that regular. I also have a Twitter account and I am a bit
more regular there, although my updates are anything but exhaustive (as you would expect from Twitter
after all). If you would like to e-mail me,
you can do so by writing to bojanATtunguz.com
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