Book(s) to gain practice with green's functions, spherical harmonics

[lurflurf]

I have Green's Functions with Applications by Dean G. Duffy. It is pretty good and covers some more than other books. It is not really about electromagnetism, with all the Jackson talk if that is what you want Dyadic Green Functions in Electromagnetic Theory by Chen-To Tai is a great book. Both as are many specialized books are priced high most places so look at the library. I learned spherical harmonics from The Theory of Spherical and Ellipsoidal Harmonics by E. W. Hobson, it is a classic with flavor, but these days people probably do not want to know that much about them.

 

[Meir Achuz]

Thanks for the suggestions. I don't know any Spanish unfortunately. The rather recent EM text by Franklin also has a chapter devoted to green's functions but I do not know how good it is; it would be very fortunate if it is indeed good because I am exclusively interested in applying these methods to EM and gravitation and not much outside of that.

Try it, I think you'll like it. It can give you a good background to go on with the more mathematical books.

 

[WannabeNewton]

Oh boy I had totally forgotten about this thread! Thanks lurf for the suggestions. Seems like it might be hard to get a hand on those books but I'll see what I can do. The Hobson book looks quite interesting; tis' quite an old book though eh :)?

And thanks clem, I had forgotten about Franklin but it seems sometime after this thread died out someone put up a rather cheap used version of the text. I agree, it would be nice to have a good solid base before moving on to the higher things. Basically what I'm trying to do is form a strong foundation for PDEs so that I can go on to study PDEs such as the full Maxwell's and Einstein's with distributions as sources because I'm trying to learn more about the "self-force" solutions. I just want to make sure I have down the basics of PDEs in electromagnetic theory before moving on to more advanced things. Up till now I have unfortunately not had much of an exposure to rigorous PDE theory.