Classical Mechanics: A Computational Approach
MIT's graduate-level mechanics course, built around the textbook by Gerald Jackson Sussman and Jack Wisdom, treats classical mechanics as a subject best understood by programming it. Lectures and assignments cover the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations, Hamilton's principle, conserved quantities, rigid body motion and tops, canonical transformations, Liouville's theorem and Poincare integral invariants, the Poincare-Birkhoff and KAM theorems, and the route from nonlinear resonance to chaos. Rather than working through equations on paper alone, students express mechanical principles as computer programs, using symbolic computation and simulation to test ideas about phase space structure and chaotic dynamics directly. Course materials include lecture notes, problem sets, and computational examples published through MIT OpenCourseWare, free to access with no enrollment or certificate attached.