These are the worksheets for our class meetings. They contain additional notes on the
material that may be useful, especially with an eye on the group exercises and the
homework problems for the week.
We may not always be able to get through all of the group exercises for a week
during our class meetings. In this case, I strongly encourage you to try and finish
up the work on your own, or rather in your study group – this will be valuable for
deepening your understanding of the material, and useful for practice. You
do not have to turn this work in, but I am happy to provide feedback.
Solutions to the group exercsies will also be made available through the GitLab
repository – I aim to post them by Wednesday of the following week. Please do
not distribute the solutions.
| Week | Dates | Name | File |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | W 9/2 - F 9/4 | W01: Newtonian Mechanics | |
| 2 | W 9/9 - F 9/11 | W02: Manifolds, Constraints, D’Alembert’s Principle | |
| 3 | M 9/14 - F 9/18 | W03: Lagrange Equations, Variational Principles Variational Calculus Demo |
PDF Jupyter |
| 4 | M 9/21 - F 9/25 | W04: Constraints Revisited, Symmetries | |
| 5 | M 9/28 - F 10/2 | W05: Velocity-Dependent Potentials, Dissipation | |
| 6 | M 10/5 - F 10/9 | W06: Nonstandard Lagrangians, Odds & Ends Cycloidal Pendulum Demo |
PDF Jupyter |
| 7 | M 10/12 - F 10/16 | W07: Central Forces | |
| 8 | M 10/19 - F 10/23 | W08: The Kepler Problem & Central Force Scattering | |
| 9 | M 10/26 - F 10/30 | W09: Orbital Dynamics, Three-Body Problem | |
| 10 | M 11/02 - F 11/06 | W10: Rigid Body Kinematics Euler Angles Demo |
PDF Mathematica |
| 11 | M 11/09 - F 11/13 | W11: Rigid Body Dynamics, Symmetric Top | |
| 12 | M 11/16 - F 11/20 | W12: Spinning Top, Coupled Oscillators Heavy Top Demo |
PDF Mathematica |
| 13 | M 11/23 - F 11/25 | W13: Hamiltonian Mechanics | |
| 14 | M 11/30 - F 12/04 | W14: Canonical Transformations & Poisson Brackets | |
| 15 | M 12/07 - F 12/11 | W15: Perturbation Theory, Relativity, Classical Fields |
Certain browsers will save Jupyter notebooks with an additional .txt extension - the files are intact, just rename them in order to do your work.