[HN Gopher] Mathematical Methods for Physics [pdf]
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Mathematical Methods for Physics [pdf]
Author : ibobev
Score : 42 points
Date : 2025-03-22 19:58 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ma.imperial.ac.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ma.imperial.ac.uk)
| BewareTheYiga wrote:
| Nice! This will make a good companion to Arfken & Weber
| Koshkin wrote:
| https://archive.org/details/Mathematical_Methods_for_Physici...
| paulpauper wrote:
| We're in something of an autodidacticism boom. I have yet to see
| anyone, in years, actually become proficient at college-level
| math/physics without formal instruction, just by doing self-study
| with tutorials like pdfs and videos.
|
| There will always be major knowledge gaps or roadblocks/impasses
| of understanding, like notation or clarification needed. This is
| not to say it cannot be done but I have to see anyone do it.
| simojo wrote:
| I don't think the OP here was imposing anything.. It seems more
| like a fitting reference for those who have performed physical
| calculations before and are looking to refresh.
| paulpauper wrote:
| I am not implying that the OP is imposing anything. i am just
| asking a related question.
| toogan wrote:
| Where is your question?
| gaugefield wrote:
| I have been self-studing alot. In fact, my first experience was
| the professor asked me to solve one of his final exam questions
| (for which he had provided his lecture notes for the course)
| within a few days after I asked for a internship.
|
| The way I do it is to create exercise where I am required to
| fill as much of details as possible in the must explicit way.
| Sometimes, this is in the form of lecturing my friends for
| several hours. Or reproducing some computational results from
| computational physics (writing software and getting results
| correctly requires alot of details getting right). Similarly,
| when I studied such notes (for some of which I did not have
| accompanying course), I tried to fill as much of details as
| possible in the notes and do the exercises.
|
| The ultimate state you want to reach is one where you can
| derive some results topic with enough details from scratch
| (without looking at the notes), like the way one can remember
| movie plot or something.
|
| If you can take this process of understanding (and getting
| details right) very seriously + feynman technique, these can be
| helpful. But, you need to be really serious about learning and
| applying them (e.g. reproducing some results)
| toogan wrote:
| The key ingredient in a formal course is the formal
| examination. Be it graded exercises or a written or oral exam.
| It forces studying at a level where you can reproduce and
| explain the key concepts and results and apply them to
| something new.
|
| In theory one can do that also with self-study. Most people
| don't, they just watch some youtube video or read a Wikipedia
| page, and then they think they have understood something. But
| the deeper understanding that comes from applying this new
| knowledge is missing. That step is forced when you take a
| university course that has some form of examination in-built.
| Doing it yourself is possible but non-obvious, hard, perhaps
| even unpleasant, and it's rare people do it. Some do though,
| and their understanding isn't inferior to a university
| graduate.
| ezconnect wrote:
| If there's a method to feel the pressure of classroom test or
| the requirement of finishing a project would really help home
| DIY learning.
| fsloth wrote:
| "but I have to see anyone do it"
|
| This is a strange take. Why or how would you ever see someone
| do it? It is very unlikely you would be aware of them.
|
| I do concur most ppl I've seen lacking formal education in
| physics - no matter how smart - do have some gaps in their
| knowledge. There seems to be something of a tacit knowledge
| transfer involved - but I have no clue what it is. Maybe
| physicists radiate physics particles or something. I'm kidding.
| But I have no clear mechanistic model what makes physicists
| physicists. It's not smarts (some required I guess, but does
| not suffice).
|
| Maybe it's just going through a specific set of rote
| calculations and lab work needed.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Posts by Susan Fowler "so you want to self-study
| math/physics" have gone hugely viral here and I have yet to
| see anyone in the comments or later report that they actually
| became really good after following her tutorial. Same for any
| other tutorial or guide or self-study overall. maybe one
| blogger whose name eludes me but extremely rare.
|
| _This is a strange take._
|
| How is it strange? What you meant to say is you disagree.
| mjburgess wrote:
| It begins when you realise all the physics examples are toy
| models, and reality is basically unmodellable. That physics
| is not mathematics, and the rules of inference in physics
| cases are the rules of reality -- not of mathematics. That
| what guarentees your modelling works is observation, that
| "hand waving" is something one does to force one's thinking
| to be empirical.
|
| I suspect people who learn physics via the textbooks end up
| learning some paralllel reality which is closed-form and
| models engineered trinkets.
|
| Physics isnt mathematics, and it isnt engineering. I think
| this is communicated in how its performed, in the emotional
| tensor of its practice. A good physicist has a healthy
| contempt of both.
| jabl wrote:
| The key thing is doing the exercise problems; most textbooks
| have them at the end of each chapter. Yes, it takes time. Yes,
| you will struggle, and it's hard work going through them. But
| it's really the only way to make sure you really understand the
| subject at a sufficient level vs. you believing you understand
| it because you watched some videos.
| wanderlust123 wrote:
| The issue is a lack of credential means you are putting in a
| lot of effort to teach yourself something hard, with little
| evidence to show you understand the material. If universities
| simply offered a for credit exam where learners had to self
| teach I reckon we would see a lot more success stories.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| People who write game engines easily fall in this category.
| Especially when they start thinking about fluids, fibers,
| cloth, fire, etc. it's high level math and physics under 60fps
| constraints
| Koshkin wrote:
| Reading the numerous lecture notes on mathematical methods used
| in physics that are available online is like reading stories
| about love: it never gets old, and each time you learn something
| new!
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