My name is Bojan Tunguz and I was born on May 10th 1974 in Sarajevo,
Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1992 my family 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 five different states - Rhode Island, California,
Indiana, Illinois and Hawai'i. I currently live in Greencastle,
Indiana, and I teach Physics at
Wabash College.
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. You can read more about
my research at my
Wabash research profile page.
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.
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.
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 Spencer. 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, and I hope
to post there some more or less regular updates. If you would like to e-mail me,
you can do so by writing to bojanATtunguz.com
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