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Hyperreality
Aug8-03, 04:05 AM
What kind of mathematics knowledge doI have to acquire to understand the technical jargon in special relativity?

HallsofIvy
Aug8-03, 06:50 AM
Special relativity is remarkably simple, mathematically, as opposed to general relativity.

As with all physics, calculus would be helpful but most of special relativity requires nothing more than algebra.

selfAdjoint
Aug8-03, 08:13 AM
An elementary course in matrices would help.

futz
Aug8-03, 10:50 AM
It depends how far you want to go I guess. To understand the fundamentals, you won't need much more than basic algebra, like the others said. If you go into more advanced formulations though, you would need to understand the concept of 4-vectors and tensors, which are considerably more difficult.

Hyperreality
Aug8-03, 09:26 PM
Thanks for everyone's reply. Do you guys have any recommended maths text books?