| Office Hours: | Tuesday and Thursday 3:30-4:30pm, or by appointment. |
| Lectures: | MWF, 3:00-3:50pm, Room 1420 Biomedical and Physical Sciences (BPS) |
| Required Text: | Classical Dynamics, J.B. Marion and S.T. Thornton, 5th edition. (You could use 4th edition and just borrow someone's 5th for some homework problems.) |
| Homework: | There will be 11 assignments due (generally on Wednesdays) at the beginning of class. The lowest homework score will be dropped when calculating your final grade. You are welcome to consult with your peers when doing your homework, but you are responsible for completing the problems yourself. Copying someone else's homework is not educational and not acceptable. Please present your homework solutions in a logical and readable form -- it's good practice for you and a kindness to the grader! |
| Grader: | Hao Ren, ren@pa.msu.edu |
| Exams: | There will be 3 midterm exams and a final. The dates for the midterm exams are Monday Feb. 13, Monday March 20, and Monday April 17. The final exam is Monday May 1 at 3:00pm. All exams are closed book. The final exam will be cumulative. |
| Grades: | Homework 25%
Midterm #1 15% Midterm #2 15% Midterm #3 15% Final Exam 30% |
| Course Outline: | We will cover chapters 1-5, 8, and 9 of Marion and Thornton. Some of the subjects we cover will be familiar to you from your introductory physics classes; but we will study them at a higher level of mathematical sophistication. Some topics, such as Lagrange's equations, will probably be completely new to you. |