Classical Mechanics

Govind Krishnaswami is a Professor of Physics at the Chennai Mathematical Institute, India, and is a recipient of the Apker Award and Marie Curie, EPSRC and Ramanujan Fellowships. His research in areas such as particle physics, nonlinear dynamics and fluid mechanics has often exploited ideas and tools from classical mechanics. He has taught a wide variety of subjects and is known for the clarity of his lectures and pedagogical articles in Resonance, a journal of science education.

• Mechanical systems with one degree of freedom.- Kepler’s gravitational two-body problem.- Newtonian to Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics.- Introduction to special relativistic mechanics.- Dynamics viewed as a vector field on state space.- Small oscillations for one degree of freedom.- Nonlinear oscillations: pendulum and anharmonic oscillator.- Rigid body mechanics.- Motion in noninertial frames of reference.- Canonical transformations.- Angle-action variables.- Hamilton-Jacobi equation.- Normal modes of oscillation and linear stability.- Bifurcations: qualitative changes in dynamics.- From regular to chaotic motion.- Dynamics of continuous deformable media.- Vibrations of a stretched string and the wave equation.- Heat diffusion equation and Brownian motion.- Introduction to fluid mechanics.