My Top 5 Mechanics Textbooks

Posted on April 18, 2008
Filed Under Physics |

Or: “What, No Goldstein?”

Of all of physics, mechanics is my favorite subject (followed by electromagnetism). It’s the easiest to grasp, because it deals with daily phenomena, but the problems can be very challenging. As a service to the aspiring physics undergraduate and graduate student, here is a list of my top 5 mechanics textbooks.

  1. An Introduction to Mechanics / Kleppner & Kolenkow. This is THE book on Newtonian dynamics, aka F=ma. It goes into great detail, despite being for undergraduates, and provides ample intuition without shunning away from the mathematics. Its greatest feature is the abundance of solved problems - just great pedagogy. The problems at the end of the chapters are hard. If you can solve all of them, then you really know mechanics. Really.
  2. Introductory Classical Mechanics,  with Problems and Solutions  / David Morin.  A much more recent book. Much like Kleppner and Kolenkow’s book, it grew out of a course on Newtonian mechanics given to outstanding freshmen, this time at Harvard. It goes into great detail and is very complete, but its true strength lies in the exhaustive problem sets at the end of each chapter, which come complete with solutions. Many of the problems are very interesting and challenging. I highly recommend this text.
  3. Mechanics / Lev Landau. The first of Landau’s set of books about Lagrangian & Hamiltonian dynamics. Landau, may he rest in peace, was a true mathematical physicist, and it shows in his writings. I’m not too fond of his books, but this one is an exception. It’s very thin and lean, but it goes straight to the heart of the matter and covers an astounding amount of material compared to its ~ 150 pages. If you have to get just one book on advanced mechanics, get this one. Don’t get Goldstein.
  4. Problems and Solution on Mechanics / Yung-Kuo Li. Not strictly a mechanics book, but rather a collection of problems with solutions. Everybody knows that to master mechanics you need to practice, practice, and practice some more, and this book is ideal for the job, with plenty of non-trivial and interesting problems with detailed solutions.
  5. Symmetry in Mechanics – a Gentle Introduction/ Stephanie Frank Singer. Once again, not strictly a mechanics textbook, but rather one that uses a famous problem from mechanics – the two body problem – to illustrate how modern concepts from mathematical physics, such as differential forms and lie groups, can be incorporated into the framework of mechanics. This is how advanced mechanics will be taught in the future (let’s hope!).  A great place to get intuition about these things.

 

Comments

One Response to “My Top 5 Mechanics Textbooks”

  1. Anna on April 23rd, 2008 7:44 am

    Muito interessante!
    So nice site!

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