Recent content by physman55

What is work defined as? How can you get the component of the force that is working parallel to the arc length? What is the arc length between A and B, B and C? Show some work?

Use conservation of energy. Are the cylinders "allowed" to roll down the ramp? If so, you have to add in a rotational kinetic energy term into your equation.

For an ideal gas you should find that the internal energy is only a function of T, hence dU/dV is definitely zero. Same applies for the enthalpy, define H = U + PV, use the ideal gas equation to substitute for PV and you'll see that H is only a function of T as well, so dH/dP is zero. I don't...

Right, gotcha. Thanks!

Hmmm actually I take that back... the LP polynomials are orth. w.r.t. other LP polynomials, but not w.r.t. the standard basis for polynomials of degree at most 3. :s

Sorry I'm not really understanding what you're saying. Aren't each of the legendre polynomial Pi's orthogonal to each of the basis vectors for P3 {1,x,x^2,x^3}? Isn't that what we're looking for?

The Legendre polynomials are...

Really stuck... computing orthogonal complement? Homework Statement The Attempt at a Solution :cry: I'm really sorry I can't provide much here because I really don't know how to proceed. Could anyone offer a hint to get me started?

Ok thanks for the explanation, that makes sense. But shouldn't the d/dx be a total derivative and not a partial; and secondly; how the hell do you solve that ODE?

By "y" being the principal value my prof means that "y" is the independent variable. For the last line, why did you ignore n(y) when you took the partial with respect to y' (on the left)?

Any ideas please? If p/a is small then I could write n(y)=n_0; but then I'm minimizing path length... so the answer is a straight line. Obviously this problem couldn't be that easy.

Homework Statement Homework Equations \frac{\delta{F}}{\delta{y}} - \frac{d}{dx}\frac{\delta{F}}{\delta{y'}} = 0The Attempt at a Solution I'm having trouble setting this one up. If I let the functional be F(x,x',y) = n(y)\sqrt{1+(x')^2} Applying the LE equation I obtain...