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Is Jackson's Electrodynamics as hard as they say it is?
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[QUOTE="Ravi Mohan, post: 5476240, member: 238412"] I just finished this semester with first 10 chapters of Jackson in a graduate E & M course. I think Mathematica may cut out maybe 10-15 percent of time for solving problems, but you may end up not using it for most of the problems. In my opinion the problems of Jackson have two layers. First one is for teaching/testing the physics explained in those long chapters. For instance if you are given a sphere with certain azimuthally symmetric potential on the surface, and you are required to find the potential at arbitrary point, you will use Legendre polynomials and spherical coordinate chart with appropriate boundary conditions. Here mathematica won't/can't help you. In the second layer, when you have set up the problem, you will need to do math. In this example you will be finding the coefficients of the expansion by using orthonormality and boundary conditions. Here mathematical might help, but I preferred manual calculations because they didn't seem hard (if problem was set up properly) and provided a good mental exercise. Although many times understanding those long chapters become irritating, and you might think that you don't need to know TE, TM modes of *EDIT waveguide*, but using mathematica might be the last thing to come across your mind (unless it is a fancy numerical question). [/QUOTE]
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Is Jackson's Electrodynamics as hard as they say it is?
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