Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics

by Gerald Jay Sussman, Jack Wisdom

We now know that there is much more to classical mechanics than previously suspected. Derivations of the equations of motion, the focus of traditional presentations of mechanics, are just the beginning. This innovative textbook, now in its second edition, concentrates on developing general methods for studying the behavior of classical systems, whether or not they have a symbolic solution. It focuses on the phenomenon of motion and makes extensive use of computer simulation in its explorations of the topic. It weaves recent discoveries in nonlinear dynamics throughout the text, rather than presenting them as an afterthought. Explorations of phenomena such as the transition to chaos, nonlinear resonances, and resonance overlap to help the student develop appropriate analytic tools for understanding. The book uses computation to constrain notation, to capture and formalize methods, and for simulation and symbolic analysis. The requirement that the computer be able to interpret any expression provides the student with strict and immediate feedback about whether an expression is correctly formulated.

This second edition has been updated throughout, with revisions that reflect insights gained by the authors from using the text every year at MIT. In addition, because of substantial software improvements, this edition provides algebraic proofs of more generality than those in the previous edition; this improvement permeates the new edition.

Genres: Physics, Science, Programming, Mathematics, Computer Science, Engineering, Nonfiction

578 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 2001

Reviews

[Benson Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm only halfway through the first chapter, but so far the text is among the clearest of any technical text that I've come across in my life. The authors correctly note that advanced technical texts have a problem with parsimonious notation - specifically, formulas are either so short that they imprecisely represent what's going on, or they're so long that it's difficult to make heads or tails of the formula from first glance. The text appropriately repeats formulas to aid learning and carefully footnotes any possible pain points readers might face. Lovely.

And for the folks complaining about installing scheme and scmutils - download VMWare or virtualbox, install Ubuntu as a VM, and follow the page of instructions to install scmutils. Yes, it's annoying to have to sudo to do stuff, but this is also not the problem that it was when the book first came out since you can easily live with your current OS and urn this stuff.

[DJ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Began this book but couldn't find a distribution of Scheme and Scmutils that ran well on a Windows machine. Tried using Mathematica but porting all that code was interfering with my learning of the physics. Its a damn shame that Sussman and Wise are so biased against Windows machines because this book and its approach looked to be great but they've sabotaged any hope of widespread availability by adamantly denying any support for the Windows community.

[Viktor Velev · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish universities would use this textbook for Classical Mechanics ;(