Why read The Variational Principles of Mechanics?

Book cover of The Variational Principles of Mechanics

Book description

Analytical mechanics is, of course, a topic of perennial interest and usefulness in physics and engineering, a discipline that boasts not only many practical applications, but much inherent mathematical beauty. Unlike many standard textbooks on advanced mechanics, however, this present text eschews a primarily technical and formalistic treatment in favor…

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Physics
Math

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Science

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Variational Principles of Mechanics as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Andrew Zangwill

Author

I love this book! Of course, it teaches the mathematics of the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian approaches to classical mechanics. But its real uniqueness lies in how the author explains the basic concepts of the subject with a constant emphasis on intuitive physics. It was only after reading Lanczos that I finally understood what variational calculations were really about. Ditto for virtual work, non-holonomic constraints, Liouville’s theorem and Hamilton-Jacobi theory. I barely noticed that I was learning about the history and philosophy of classical mechanics at the same time.

From Andrew's list on titles for physics graduate students.