Pupa Gilbert is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin - Madison and an amateur surrealist painter. She is a physicist with passionate loves for biology, geoscience, and modern art. She studied at the Sapienza University of Rome, worked as a staff scientist at the Italian National Research Council and at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne until she joined the University of Wisconsin in 1999. Her research focuses on biominerals, including coral skeletons, tooth enamel, nacre, and sea urchin spines. She studies them with spectromicroscopy methods at the Advanced Light Source in Berkeley, where she discovers the complex structures of the biominerals, and their formation mechanisms. She won several awards for her research and teaching, including the UW-Madison Distinguished Teaching Award in 2011, Radcliffe Fellowship 2014-15, and the David A. Shirley Award in 2018. She lives in Madison and Berkeley with her husband Ben.

1. Light and Light Waves
2. Reflection and Refraction
3. Lenses
4. The Human Eye
5. Photography
6. Color and Color Vision
7. Additive Color Mixing
8. Subtractive Color Mixing
9. Color Generating Mechanisms
10. Sound Waves
11. Simple Harmonic Motion
12. Damping and Resonance
13. Vibration of Strings
14. Waves in Pipes
15. Superposition, beats, and Harmony
16. Musical Scales
17. Fourier Analysis
18. Musical Instruments
19. Sound Perception: Timbre, Loudness, and Pitch
20. The Ear
21. Solutions to Problems