Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics

by Gerald Jay Sussman

Blurb

Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics is a classical mechanics textbook written by Gerald Jay Sussman and Jack Wisdom with Meinhard E. Mayer. It was published by MIT Press in 2001. The book is used at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to teach a class in advanced classical mechanics, starting with Lagrange's equations and proceeding through canonical perturbation theory.
SICM explains some physical phenomena by showing computer programs for simulating them. These programs are written in the Scheme programming language, as were the programs in Sussman's earlier computer science textbook, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
Sussman wrote:
Classical mechanics is deceptively simple. It is surprisingly easy to get the right answer with fallacious reasoning or without the real understanding. To address this problem Jack Wisdom and I, with help from Hardy Mayer, have written a book with the title of this talk and are teaching a class at MIT that uses computational techniques to communicate a deeper understanding of Classical mechanics. We use computational algorithms to express the methods used to analyze dynamical phenomena.

Member Reviews Write your own review

Be the first person to review

Log in to comment