Introducing Classical Mechanics: A Guide for Beginners

[Kalimaa23]

Greetings,

My academic year draws to an end. I was hoping to prepare some of my 2nd year courses. Especially classical mechanics.

So I was wondering if anyone could recommend a site that would allow me to get a good intoduction into the Lagrange/Hamilton formalism.

I already found a graduate course on the subject, but find it a bit out of my league. With no knowledge of partial differential equations it is rather hard to follow, especially if all these things are considered "trivial"

I have a good grasp of Linear Algebra (up to hermitian an symmetric operators), multivariable calculus and Newtonian mechanics, to give you an idea of the level I'm looking for.

-Thanks in advance

 

[quantumdude]

Hello, and welcome to PF.

The only one I know of is at this link:
http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/physics/pdf/9909/9909035.pdf

Hope that helps,

 

[pmb]

Originally posted by Dimitri Terryn
Greetings,

My academic year draws to an end. I was hoping to prepare some of my 2nd year courses. Especially classical mechanics.

So I was wondering if anyone could recommend a site that would allow me to get a good intoduction into the Lagrange/Hamilton formalism.

I already found a graduate course on the subject, but find it a bit out of my league. With no knowledge of partial differential equations it is rather hard to follow, especially if all these things are considered "trivial"

I have a good grasp of Linear Algebra (up to hermitian an symmetric operators), multivariable calculus and Newtonian mechanics, to give you an idea of the level I'm looking for.

-Thanks in advance

I think this document

www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~phys16/handouts/textbook/ch5.pdf

is a great place to start. Also - During the summer I plan on building the mechanics section to my web site

www.geocities.com/physics_world/

Feel free to e-mail me on anything at peter.brown46@verizon.net. It'll help guide me in deciding what to include and at what level etc. We can help each other in this respect.

Pete

 

[Kalimaa23]

Thank yoy both.

Tom, the one you found is exactly the one I already have. It is a bit out of my league, but I'll give it a shot anyway.

Pete, what you have seems just fine. I'll keep in tocuh.

 

[Kalimaa23]

I stand corrected, the Harvard one is EXCELLENT! Exactly what I was looking for.

Their whole server is packed with courses and textbooks like this...
The mathematics section does seem a little less developped than the physics one, but there are some interesting things there.

The trouble is, that just using their stuff on your site will probably violate half a dozen copyright regulations

I'll keep looking for more, and if anything else comes up I'll post it up on this thread.