In this course, you will be learning about advanced methods in classical mechanics. While it is in principle true that you can solve any classical system through brute force application of Newton’s 3 laws, this is intractable or at least overly tedious for a wide range of interesting and relevant mechanical systems which yield only with more advanced techniques. In this course, we will:
- Review/strengthen/generalize the concepts of force, coordinates, trajectories, rotational motion and energy
- Review theory of oscillations
- Introduce concepts associated with the calculus of variations
- Lagrangian Mechanics
- Central Force Motion
- Mechanics in non-inertial frames
- Rigid body rotation
- Coupled systems
- Hamiltonian mechanics
- Additional Special Topics (Chaos? Classical field theory? Fluid dynamics?)