Mathematics 489, Sec. 201/501, Spring, 2008

General Relativity and Tensors

Announcements (reverse chronological order)

• Final exam, Monday May 5, 8:00 a.m., is OPEN-BOOK. This means you can bring books, notes, supplementary material of any kind, with these restrictions:
  • no live electronics in the room;
  • no more than one book checked out of the TAMU library.
  In particular, it is important to bring your copy of Chapter 8 of my book Aspects of Quantum Field Theory in Curved Space-Time, "Some Geometrical Apparatus". It will be referred to on the test. The books are intended mainly as references for formulas. Any extensive (say, sentence-sized) verbal copying should be in quotation marks with the source indicated.
• Next Next Math Club meeting (Tuesday, April 29 -- movie)
• Math Awareness Lecture, "Mathematics and Voting" (Monday, April 28, 6:30 p.m., BLOC 156)
• Two messages about the Duke summer program (summer job opportunity)
• In grading your rough drafts of the E&M paper, I may have told some of you something wrong about part 12 ("... obtain the Lorentz force ... Be careful about the factors of gamma.") If what I wrote on your paper is inconsistent with an E&M textbook such as Jackson, believe the book. (In the first edition of Jackson, the relevant page is 405 and the section is 12.5. Look in index under "Lorentz force equation in covariant form".)
  Also, in part 14, don't overreact to the command "Show that this generalizes to arbitrary rotation matrices." A verbal argument explaining why it was enough to consider the z axis case should suffice.
• This Thursday (6 March): Colloquium on black holes
• Below I have posted the TeX file for the electromagnetism assignment, in case you want to import some of the questions into your own document.
• Revised schedule for electromagnetism paper
  1. Rough draft due Friday, 29 Feb. Format of your choice: handwritten, printed, or e-mail. (If e-mailed, please convert to PDF or PS rather than sending a proprietary word processor file, such as .doc.)
  2. Final version due Monday, 24 March. (21 March is a holiday.)
• New notes on the relation between matrix inverses and index shuffling
• Notes on div, grad, and curl in curvilinear coordinates
• Probable permanent office hours: M 2:00-2:50, R 10:00-11:00, F 10:20-11:10.
• Office hours for week Jan. 28 - Feb. 1: Tentatively the same as last week: T 2, R 10, F 10:30. I will be hosting a research visitor from Mexico, so I may not be able to meet all these hours.
• The instructions for the electromagnetism paper are now posted below, and I've revised the handout to reflect reality. However, DO NOT print them out today, because you will get paper copies in class very soon.
• First meeting of the honors section will be Thursday, 24 Jan., 11:15 a.m., at or outside my office (BLOC 620H).
• Office hours for week Jan. 22-25: T 2, R 10, F 10:30 (for about an hour each time).
• Notes on hyperbolic functions and the twin paradox
• Office hour Wed. Jan. 16 will start at 3:00 (not 2:00 as previously announced).
• Solution to Exercise 1.3

Test solutions

• Test A
• Test B
• Final

Course handout (revised 23 Jan)

Electromagnetism paper ._._. Here's the TeX file. I apologize that occasionally you will need to purge some of my private macros. (For example, replacing "\zT" by "\hbox" should usually work.) LaTeX users will need to do more work.

Tensor homework

Prioritization of exercises

The latest observational cosmology, with an executive summary by our local expert.

More books on relativity

Special issues of journals entirely devoted to relativity

Old course home page

Go to home pages: Fulling ._._. Calclab ._._. Math Dept ._._. University

e-mail: fulling@math.tamu.edu