About physref

  1. What is it?
  2. Who made it and why?
  3. Why open source?
  4. How is it different?

What is it?

Physref is an open-source physics formulary that aims to be a concise, useable, and useful reference that is targeted primarily at undergraduate physics students but is also intended to be useful for high school students as well as graduate students and professionals.

Who made it and why?

Hi there! I'm Ryan Royle, creator of physref. As a physics postdoc transitioning into web development, physref is my first major learning project. It is based on a series of formula sheets I compiled during my student years. They were very useful to me and I wanted to build something similar that would be useful to others.

Why open source?

I simply don't have the time necessary to author the huge amount of content this project will need. I need your help! I've put a lot of effort into ease of content creation so that non-developers can contribute formulary pages. A basic familiarity with LaTeX math should be enough to get you going. If you would like to contribute to or edit the formulary, read How to Contribute.

If you're a dev interested in contributing to the code base, have a look at the project repo on GitHub.

How is it different?

Format

Physref aims to be as concise as possible by means of an expandable formulary-style layout, where only the key equations are displayed initially and supporting explanations, clarifications, caveats, etc., are viewable if needed by expanding the hidden sections. Equations are grouped into sectioned pages that cover a single subject. As an example, see the page on central force motion.

Design

Physref is designed with a mobile-first approach using a responsive layout that adapts to larger screens. Special attention has been paid to making the interface clean and intuitive. The formulary can be navigated by directory menu or search bar and is optimized for external search engine indexing. And thanks to the awesome frameworks and libraries used like React, Gatsby, and KaTeX, the whole site runs super fast!

Technology

Physref uses the modern JAM stack approach (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) to building a website that doesn't depend on a web server. It is a JavaScript app built with the React UI library that leverages the Gatsby framework to create static pages that are blazingly fast and optimized for search engines.

All content is written in markdown, a lightweight markup language, which is enhanced with custom React components to add functionality and properly format page elements. The markdown files are passed to a data layer in Gatsby powered by GraphQL and then automatically turned into HTML pages with help from various Gatsby plugins. LaTeX equations are rendered by the super-fast typesetting library KaTeX.

To learn more, check out the project repo on GitHub.