For physics students interested in the mathematics they use, and for math students interested in seeing how some of the ideas of their discipline find realization in an applied setting. The presentation strikes a balance between formalism and application, between abstract and concrete. The interconnections among the various topics are clarified both by the use of vector spaces as a central unifying theme, recurring throughout the book, and by putting ideas into their historical context. Enough of the essential formalism is included to make the presentation self-contained.

In an introductory style with many examples, Advanced Methods of Mathematical Physics presents some of the concepts, methods, and tools that form the core of mathematical physics. The material covers two main broad categories of topics: 1) abstract topics, such as groups, topology, integral equations, and stochasticity, and 2) the methods of nonlinear dynamics.

Useful treatment of classical mechanics, electromagnetic theory, and relativity includes explanations of function theory, vectors, matrices, dyadics, tensors, partial differential equations, other advanced mathematical techniques. Nearly 200 problems with answers.

Since the first volume of this work came out in Germany in 1937, this book, together with its first volume, has remained standard in the field. Courant and Hilbert's treatment restores the historically deep connections between physical intuition and mathematical development, providing the reader with a unified approach to mathematical physics. The present volume represents Richard Courant's final revision of 1961.

Graduate-level text offers unified treatment of mathematics applicable to many branches of physics. Theory of vector spaces, analytic function theory, theory of integral equations, group theory, and more. Many problems. Bibliography.

A first consequence of this difference in texture concerns the attitude we must take toward some (or perhaps most) investigations in "applied mathe matics," at least when the mathematics is applied to physics. Namely, those investigations have to be regarded as pure mathematics and evaluated as such. For example, some of my mathematical colleagues have worked in recent years on the Hartree-Fock approximate method for determining the structures of many-electron atoms and ions. When the method was intro duced, nearly fifty years ago, physicists did the best they could to justify it, using variational principles, intuition, and other techniques within the texture of physical reasoning. By now the method has long since become part of the established structure of physics. The mathematical theorems that can be proved now (mostly for two- and three-electron systems, hence of limited interest for physics), have to be regarded as mathematics. If they are good mathematics (and I believe they are), that is justification enough. If they are not, there is no basis for saying that the work is being done to help the physicists. In that sense, applied mathematics plays no role in today's physics. In today's division of labor, the task of the mathematician is to create mathematics, in whatever area, without being much concerned about how the mathematics is used; that should be decided in the future and by physics.

Mathematical physics plays an important role in the study of many physical processes — hydrodynamics, elasticity, and electrodynamics, to name just a few. Because of the enormous range and variety of problems dealt with by mathematical physics, this thorough advanced undergraduate- or graduate-level text considers only those problems leading to partial differential equations. Contents: I. Classification of Partial Differential Equations II. Evaluations of the Hyperbolic Type III. Equations of the Parabolic Type IV. Equations of Elliptic Type V. Wave Propagation in Space VI. Heat Conduction in Space VII. Equations of Elliptic Type (Continuation) The authors — two well-known Russian mathematicians — have focused on typical physical processes and the principal types of equations dealing with them. Special attention is paid throughout to mathematical formulation, rigorous solutions, and physical interpretation of the results obtained. Carefully chosen problems designed to promote technical skills are contained in each chapter, along with extremely useful appendixes that supply applications of solution methods described in the main text. At the end of the book, a helpful supplement discusses special functions, including spherical and cylindrical functions.

Have you ever wondered why the language of modern physics centres on geometry? Or how quantum operators and Dirac brackets work? What a convolution really is? What tensors are all about? Or what field theory and lagrangians are, and why gravity is described as curvature? This book takes you on a tour of the main ideas forming the language of modern mathematical physics. Here you will meet novel approaches to concepts such as determinants and geometry, wave function evolution, statistics, signal processing, and three-dimensional rotations. You will see how the accelerated frames of special relativity tell us about gravity. On the journey, you will discover how tensor notation relates to vector calculus, how differential geometry is built on intuitive concepts, and how variational calculus leads to field theory. You will meet quantum measurement theory, along with Green functions and the art of complex integration, and finally general relativity and cosmology. The book takes a fresh approach to tensor analysis built solely on the metric and vectors, with no need for one-forms. This gives a much more geometrical and intuitive insight into vector and tensor calculus, together with general relativity, than do traditional, more abstract methods. Don Koks is a physicist at the Defence Science and Technology Organisation in Adelaide, Australia. His doctorate in quantum cosmology was obtained from the Department of Physics and Mathematical Physics at Adelaide University. Prior work at the University of Auckland specialised in applied accelerator physics, along with pure and applied mathematics.