Analytical Dynamics Of Discrete Systems

Analytical Dynamics of Discrete Systems

This book is to serve as a text for engineering students at the senior or beginning graduate level in a second course in dynamics. It grew out of many years experience in teaching such a course to senior students in mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. While temperamentally disinclined to engage in textbook writing, I nevertheless wrote the present volume for the usual reason-I was unable to find a satisfactory English-language text with the content covered in my inter mediate course in dynamics. Originally, I had intended to fit this text very closely to the content of my dynamics course for seniors. However, it soon became apparent that that course reflects too many of my personal idiosyncracies, and perhaps it also covers too little material to form a suitable basis for a general text. Moreover, as the manuscript grew, so did my interest in certain phases of the subject. As a result, this book contains more material than can be studied in one semester or quarter. My own course covers Chapters 1 to 5 (Chapters 1,2, and 3 lightly) and Chapters 8 to 20 (Chapter 17 lightly).

Analytical Dynamics

In his great work, Mecanique Analytique (1788)-^Lagrange used the term "analytical" to mean "non-geometrical." Indeed, Lagrange made the following boast: "No diagrams will be found in this work. The methods that I explain in it require neither constructions nor geometrical or mechanical arguments, but only the algebraic operations inherent to a regular and uniform process. Those who love Analysis will, with joy, see mechanics become a new branch of it and will be grateful to me for thus having extended its field." This was in marked contrast to Newton's Philosohiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) which is full of elaborate geometrical constructions. It has been remarked that the classical Greeks would have understood some of the Principia but none of the Mecanique Analytique. The term analytical dynamics has now come to mean the develop ments in dynamics from just after Newton to just before the advent of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, and it is this meaning of the term that is meant here. Frequent use will be made of diagrams to illus trate the theory and its applications, although it will be noted that as the book progresses and the material gets "more analytical", the number of figures per chapter tends to decrease, although not monotonically.

Analytical Dynamics of Discrete Systems