Jackson: t-minus three semesters and counting

[bjnartowt]

Jackson: t-minus three semesters and counting!

Okay, help me with this thought-experiment: I was wondering how well-prepared for graduate (Jackson) electromagnetism I would be if I had studied the entirety of Griffith's "Intro...Electrodynamics" one year beforehand. What subject-matter would I still be missing, so to speak? I'll have a summer before I have to study out of Jackson's book, so I was wondering if there was anything I should study beforehand, as preparation. Would a math-course in partial-differential-equations (whatever that means...) help?

I also wish to study general relativity during the same semester: what prior-knowledge should I amass during the summer beforehand?

 

[Pengwuino]

If "whatever that means" is your response to PDE's, you might be in trouble. Do Griffiths, take the PDE course, I assume you may have already taken an ODE course (ordinary differential equations). That should be a good starter...

 

[bjnartowt]

If "whatever that means" is your response to PDE's, you might be in trouble. Do Griffiths, take the PDE course, I assume you may have already taken an ODE course (ordinary differential equations). That should be a good starter...

Ha ha...I just meant that I didn't know the PDE-course-description offhand. Now that I consult it: they speak of "Green's functions, Fourier series, and other classical techniques".

 

[seycyrus]

Start assembling other EM textbooks that cover the same principles and have example problems worked out. Landau-Lifgarbagez...

 

[Pengwuino]

Ha ha...I just meant that I didn't know the PDE-course-description offhand. Now that I consult it: they speak of "Green's functions, Fourier series, and other classical techniques".

I'm using Jackson right now and Green's Functions are some pretty wild stuff to learn, I recommend burning that knowledge into your head however you can. Fourier series is important as well, definitely. Understanding Legendre polynomials, bessel functions, spherical harmonics... stuff you'd find in a PDE course most likely, is good to know. Hell, just grab a mathematical physics book and go nuts on it.