Classical mechanics, together with classical electrodynamics and quantum mechanics, forms the core of present day theoretical training for undergraduate students. This course is the first class of an introduction to classical mechanics essential to understand most fields of physics.

Classical mechanics is the study of the motion of relatively large bodies in accordance with the general principles widely known as Newtonian mechanics. It has many important applications in the areas of astronomy, chemistry, biology, geology, and engineering. It describes the formation of the universe, the orbit of satellites, molecular collisions, stability of structures, dynamics of nonlinear systems, and etc.

The success in understanding this course is not only to work problems that exercise the principles but also to practice numerically the mechanical systems. It includes the dynamics of a particle, the harmonic oscillator, nonlinear oscillations, chaos, and gravitation.

Therefore, three or four problems at the end of each chapter are assigned to the homework every week. And one or two numerical calculations are given to practice the principles every week. In particular, we use the program of MATLAB to compute the problems in classical mechanics. The technical computing environment of MATLAB now provides an opportunity to easily solve realistic and more complicated problems. The following website is useful:

MATLAB: http://www.mathworks.com