Introduction to Oscillations and Waves
Oscillatory and wave phenomena get a focused introduction built from MIT's MITES Summer program, a six-week STEM course for rising high school seniors. The material works through why oscillations arise in systems near equilibrium, the mathematical properties those oscillations take on in different physical contexts, and how oscillations connect to traveling waves, building up the basic mathematical description of a wave from there. Lecture notes and course materials are freely available through MIT OpenCourseWare under a Creative Commons license, letting anyone work through the same problem sets and readings used in the residential program. The course assumes calculus-level mathematics and rewards students who want a rigorous first pass at the physics underlying springs, pendulums, sound, and other periodic systems before tackling a full undergraduate mechanics or waves course.