A Student's Guide to Maxwell's Equations | Daniel Fleisch | Good adjunct to textbook, or stand-alone

A Student's Guide to Maxwell's Equations | Daniel Fleisch | Doesn't get any better than this!

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A Student's Guide ...

	A Student's Guide to Maxwell's Equations Daniel Fleisch Cambridge University Press, 2008 - 144 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Gauss's law for electric fields, Gauss's law for magnetic fields, Faraday's law, and the Ampere-Maxwell law are four of the most influential equations in science. In this guide for students, each equation is the subject of an entire chapter, with detailed, plain-language explanations of the physical meaning of each symbol in the equation, for both the integral and differential forms. The final chapter shows how Maxwell's equations may be combined to produce the wave equation, the basis for the electromagnetic theory of light. This book is a wonderful resource for undergraduate and graduate courses in electromagnetism and electromagnetics. A website hosted by the author at www.cambridge.org/9780521701471 contains interactive solutions to every problem in the text as well as audio podcasts to walk students through each chapter.

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Good adjunct to textbook, or stand-alone

I took a graduate course in electromagnetics, and there was so much material that I sometimes had a feeling I had lost site of the basics. I have completed only the first section in the book, on Guass's law for electric charge, but that is enough to get a flavor of the whole book. The material is well organized, easy to understand without being too simplified. A unique feature, which I have never seen before, is the printing of the fundamental equations in large type, with arrows with text explanations for each and every part of the symbol. I have found in my math and physics studies it is essential to frequently ask oneself "what exactly does this equation mean?" It is easy to get wrapped up in or bogged down in symbolism and forget what exactly is being talked about. Many textbooks help to foster this disconnect by being overly cryptic and making statements like "it obviously follows that ... " while skipping over the three pages of calculations needed to make the statement "obvious"! The author of "A Students Guide" never does this, taking care to explain in detail what each part of the equation means both mathematically and physically. Finally, I like the problem sets at the end of each section. You can work the problems, then find the completely worked out solutions on the web. If you get stuck part way through, the website even provides hints to keep you going. By the way, if you are serious about learning the material, ALWAYS work through the problem sets. This is the only way to really get a grasp on the material. I am looking forward to going through the rest of the book!

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Doesn't get any better than this!

I've studied quite a few textbooks (Jackson, Griffith, etc) and supplementary material ("Div, Grad, Curl,...", Feynman Lectures, etc) on classical electromagnetism over the years and I can say without a doubt that for clarity and explanatory power, this book is in a class by itself! The folks that choose the course materials for university physics curriculums need to be made aware of the existence and quality of this booklet. It's a shame there aren't more out there of this caliber. It isn't a replacement for the usual textbooks on the subject. But, it definitely is a much needed supplement to any of them since it lays out the foundational concepts and mathematical framework in a much more understandable and memorable (!) manner than any textbook has ever done; at least, any that I'm aware of.

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Fleisch is thorough

As an undergrad physics major, my toughest challenge was electromagnetism; many of my non-physics major friends are surprised that it's not quantum that was the hardest, or general relativity. Nope, it was good ol' E&M.

I am now just starting my PhD physics courses, so I was on Amazon looking for supplements to Jackson's book on electrodynamics. I came across this book and had thought it would have been a great help in my undergrad course, but probably too elementary for the upcoming PhD course...but when I noticed Fleisch had podcasts for every section in every chapter, I became intrigued. After reading the positive reviews, looking at some excerpts, and sampling a few of the podcasts, I knew this was no ordinary book on electromagnetism: Fleisch might be the first guy in history to say, "Maybe E&M is presented to students a bit too strongly at first; let's slow it down and break it apart piece by piece so the student can actually understand what's going on instead of fumbling in the dark."

I went over most of this book before classes began this semester and I truly feel it solidified the basics enough that I confidently face the graduate text.

In short: I recommend it.

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A Powerful Demonstration of What Clear Mathematical Explanation can do

A new category of Pulitzer Prizes now must be established so that its first recipient can be Daniel Fleisch, who deserves it for the impressively clear mathematical exposition presented in this book.

This "Guide to Maxwell's Equations" alone proves that there is no need for mathematical explanations to be enigmatic and obscure to the point of being incomprehensible simply because the concepts are abstract and difficult. What this exposition suggests is that it takes one kind of talent to understand abstract mathematics and an entirely different type to be able to explain complex and abstract ideas, simply.

And as is always the case with great minds like Fleisch's, they begin simply: by explaining clearly the function of each mathematical term in an equation, and then showing how they all go together to explain larger more abstract concepts.

If there is a clearer explanation of complex mathematics than this, I have yet to see it.

The bonus of the book of course is not just that it allows one to understand perhaps the most important four equations known to man (even more important than Einstein's E=MC^2, since it is derivable directly from Maxwell's Equations) but that all of this understanding is transferable to other mathematical contexts.

Now when I am reading other complex mathematics -- especially where the surface, or line integrals are used. Or when I forget the conceptual difference between the curl and the divergent, I just pull out this little book, review the concepts in context and then transfer that conceptual understanding to the new problem. I did not even need to consult the website to get a pretty much full understanding of the equations. But once I did, it just nailed down all remaining doubts.

What an incredible find! Fifty stars

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Read this book before that first EM class

The first class in Electricity and Magnetism is often difficult for undergraduates. The course material brings together diverse concepts in Physics and Mathematics in a way that can challenge some students. This book is a useful primer for undergraduates. The book focuses on the mechanics of applying the four equations attributed to Maxwell. There is little or no discussion of the engineering or physics involved in applying these equations. The author presents each equation in a separate chapter and shows the different forms, e.g. integral, differential, in which they are written. The step by step identification of each and every term and operation can get boring but it provides a good explanation for the new student. It is a quick read and can be a useful reference during a class. The problems at the end of each chapter are good ones and I particularly liked the approach of providing solutions to all problems on a website.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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