Various Memos

On this page you will find links to some memos that I have written that may be of more general interest to a wider audience than that originally intended. I am placing them here in the hope that the reader will find them to be of some pedagogical value. Although these memos contain no original research, I believe that the approach to the subject matter is original.

• The Multilayer Reflectivity memo presents a self-contained derivation of the reflection and transmission probabilties of a plane classical electromagnetc wave incident upon a multilayer with complex indices of refraction.
• The Combining Error Ellipses memo was written to show how to combine a number of independent estimates of a source's position to obtain an improved estimate of its position. Here I have adopted a general multivariate approach and discuss tangent plane projections.
• Creating the ``Behr Memo'' was my introduction to Bayesian methods. Here the technique is applied to the ratio of two Poisson rates (a hardness ratio).