Where Can I Find Unique and Challenging Problems for My Freshman E&M Seminar?

[lizs]

I and a few other freshman are in a seminar that's intended to help us in E & M and requires us to bring questions and problems to the seminar to work on. We've been doing some textbook problems, but it would be better if we could find something more challenging or conceptually interesting so that about four people could work through it. Other than poking around internet forums, does anyone have any suggestions for where we might find some unique or conceptually difficult problems?

We're in MIT's 8.022 ("advanced* electricity and magnetism"). It's a freshman course that assumes knowledge of multivariable calculus. We use Purcell's Electricity and Magnetism (which I rather like). Might Griffiths be a good resource for more material?

*incredibly difficult

I'm sorry if this is in the wrong forum, I'm new around here. :/

 

[Redbelly98]

Thread moved to Advanced Physics

Welcome to Physics Forums

For pretty challenging problems, you could try J. D. Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics. It's a standard textbook for 1st year graduate students, and I'll bet every physics professor in your department owns a copy. If the graduate level class at MIT uses it, then the grad students will all own a copy too.

I will mention that many graduate students do find the book challenging. An advantage for you is that it uses the same units as Purcell's book (cgs/Gaussian).

Good luck in your studies, I hope you have time to stick around here at PF.

EDIT:
I haven't used Griffiths, but I know it's a pretty widely used textbook and is probably fine for your purposes. If it uses MKS units, you'll have to deal with equations looking different -- but I don't offhand know what units Griffiths uses.

 

[lizs]

Thank you, I'll look into both! Griffiths uses MKS but I suppose I'll have to learn to deal with it at some point anyway.

And yeah, I hope I have time at some point to stick around here and help others out a bit :)