A modern treatment of classical mechanics, this graduate level text includes material on relativistic physics, chaos theory, and nonlinear dynamics in addition to the standard treatment of classical mechanics. It also focuses on geometric mechanics, and emphasizes physical lines of reasoning, not mathematical formalism. But, why the stress on geometry? Modern work in mechanics tends to consist of algebraic and analytical representations of spatial objects and relationships. The role of geometry is to provide qualitative ...
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A modern treatment of classical mechanics, this graduate level text includes material on relativistic physics, chaos theory, and nonlinear dynamics in addition to the standard treatment of classical mechanics. It also focuses on geometric mechanics, and emphasizes physical lines of reasoning, not mathematical formalism. But, why the stress on geometry? Modern work in mechanics tends to consist of algebraic and analytical representations of spatial objects and relationships. The role of geometry is to provide qualitative structure to quantitative formalism (that is, most physics can be expressed just by formulas). The author assumes that the reader has an understanding of Lagrangian mechanics, but no background in Hamiltonian mechanics is assumed.
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