Recent content by medthehatta

I believe that the sum \lambda_a f_a is the work that would be done on the system due to a displacement away from the constraints (except that those motions don't actually happen). That is, the f_a terms are generalized displacements which are disallowed by the constraints (which is why you...

Sorry, Hassan2, I keep forgetting to reply. You are absolutely right. An excellent point. But the eigenvectors will always be linearly independent, so if it has repeated eigenvalues you can orthonormalize the eigenvectors using Gram-Schmidt and use those orthonormalized vectors to produce...

You're right, Hassan2. A useful result from linear algebra is that any real symmetric matrix has orthogonal eigenvectors. Since the stress tensor is symmetric (except in really weird situations that I don't fully understand and don't typically show up in any commonly used material), it has...

Linear momentum will be conserved in the directions in which there aren't any applied forces, and angular momentum will be conserved in the directions in which there aren't any applied torques. Here's a suggestion in the case of electrostatics: try writing down the potential for the system and...

EDIT: Forgive me: the constraint you've listed is (second-order! :eek:) nonholonomic. The techniques I pointed out, of course, won't work for a nonholonomic constraint. My erroneous response was: I hope this isn't an overly flippant reply, but here are some suggestions, both of which...