dmt-arch / sicm

Working through Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics.

Working through the Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics

Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics is a book by Gerald Jay Sussman and Jack Wisdom that aims to explain classical mechanics using the variational principle with no ambiguity. It does this by ensuring that every mathematical expression in the book is in one-to-one correspondence with an equivalent expression written in computer code. And computer code is nothing if not precise and unambiguous.

In this repository, you will find all the code corresponding to the mathematics in the book, including the numerous interspersed exercises. This repository also holds the source code for the underlying Scheme library, scmutils, that is heavily employed in the book, along with notes on how to get all this working on OS X with mit-scheme.

If you are interested in classical mechanics in general but find this book a little too deep to jump into as a first step (as it was for me), I'd like to suggest the following courses, in order:

1. To whet your appetite: [Physics I: Classical Mechanics by Walter Lewin] (http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-01-physics-i-classical-mechanics-fall-1999/)

2. To get an intuitive feeling for abstract theory: [Classical Mechanics by Leonard Susskind] (http://theoreticalminimum.com/courses/classical-mechanics/2011/fall)

3. To get a better handle on programming (and Scheme): Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Installation

1. Install sudo port install mit-scheme (using Macports):

   sudo port install mit-scheme

2. Navigate to sicm/scmutils/src and run

   mit-scheme (load "compile") (load "load")

License

TODO: GPL v3