Classical Mechanics: with MATLAB Applications

This is a textbook that deals with the subject of classical mechanics. It is intended for students at the undergraduate level. The subject is considered essential for the advanced study of physics and engineering. Students enrolled in undergraduate classical mechanics are assumed to have taken a year of calculus based physics. While students who have taken differential equations and mathematical physics will perform better in understanding the underlying concepts, such courses can easily be a co-requisite. The text makes use of traditional concepts in analytical mechanics such as Newton's laws of motion, harmonic motion, vector calculus, systems of coordinates, central forces, gravitation, systems of particles, rigid body rotation, Lagrangian dynamics, and non-linear dynamics. However, due to the large emphasis placed on computational physics in many departments, this text incorporates numerical methods using MATLAB. Scripts written in MATLAB are compatible with the open source OCTAVE platform. The various concepts developed in the text are backed by MATLAB scripts, which are included within the text for easy comprehension. The accompanying compact disk contains the scripts' source code as well as the figures generated by the scripts. MATLAB is a popular computational tool that's available from http:///www.mathworks.com in a student or professional version and the open source OCTAVE is available form https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/. The scripts incorporated to carry out the multitude of calculations presented in the textbook are self-contained and should easily run on MATLAB versions 5.3 and above or OCTAVE. The scripts are fully commented so that students with little computational skills could easily modify them to make their own investigations of the various physics concepts and formulae. The textbook contains a MATLAB tutorial in appendix A. Appendix B contains useful mathematical formulas employed in the text. Appendix C contains useful geometry formulas. Appendix D contains important line, area, and volume elements. For easy reference, needed physical constants often needed in computations are provided on the back and front covers. A solutions manual may be made available to instructors who adopt the text. The author's website "http://www.westga.edu/~jhasbun/" will contain a link associated with the textbook as well. Read more