Overview and Logistics
Time and Location
Class will meet Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 11:30am - 12:20pm in BPS 1420 (note that the room listed for PHY820 in the course catalog is wrong.)
Course Personnel and Office Hours
|
Prof. Heiko Hergert NSCL/FRIB, Office 2105 hergert@frib.msu.edu |
We, 2:00-4:00pm, BPS 1248 or by appointment |
[No image] |
Ms. Ruxin Zhang NSCL/FRIB, Office 2118 zhangru@frib.msu.edu |
tbd |
Textbooks
There are several textbook options that cover the essential material of the course, but the lectures themselves will not follow one specific text. Topics for each week will be given in some detail on the schedule page, alongside reading assignments that refer to the the following texts:
Classical Mechanics (3rd Edition) by Herbert Goldstein and Charles P. Poole & John Safko.
Classical Mechanics by John R. Taylor.
Homework
Homeworks are due at the beginning of class on Fridays, unless announced otherwise.
The homework sets consist of analytical and computational problems. The latter are intended to (further) familiarize you with numerical methods for solving and visualizing equations of motion that you will encounter during class.
Specific problems may be tagged for PHY820 students only (of course, PHY422 students are welcome to try and tackle these too).
Code Repository
Jupyter notebooks for the computational homeworks are hosted in a GitLab repository on MSU’s GitLab server. While homework sets and practice exams, solutions and lecture notes will be posted on this website, they will also be added to the repository, so the most convenient way to obtain the most up to date version is by performing a git pull. For more information, check the page’s computation section.
Discussion Boards
If you have questions or comments about administrative matters, course topics, or the homework outside of the office hours, you are encouraged to open a discussion on the course’s D2L discussion boards. In this way, all students can participate, or be made aware of issues. Please do not abuse the boards to post solutions to the homework problems!
Exams
There will be two midterms (see schedule page) and a comprehensive final on Wednesday, Dec 11, starting at 7:45am, in CIP 115 (aka the International Center). The PHY422 and PHY820 versions of the final will be two and three hours long, respectively. See this page) for more information.
Grading
Your final score and grade will be determined from the following components:
25% Midterm 1
25% Midterm 2
30% Final
30% Homework
The maximum achieveable score is 110.
The envisioned grading scale is
| Score | Grade |
|---|---|
| ≥ 92 | 4.0 |
| 84-91 | 3.5 |
| 76-83 | 3.0 |
| 68-75 | 2.5 |
| 60-67 | 2.0 |
| 52-59 | 1.5 |
| 44-51 | 1.0 |
| < 44 | 0.0 |