Course info

These lecture notes are based on a course given to first year mathematics and computer science students at faculty of sciences, university of Medea. The course and this manuscript comply with the official teaching program of the Algerian Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research.

This course is taught during the first semester, giving the student an introduction to classical mechanics, namely the mathematics and physics of material points. The student is assumed to have previous knowledge of basic mathematics, namely Euclidean geometry, calculus (derivative, integrals, ...) and elementary linear algebra (vectors, systems of linear equations, ...).

This manuscript is organised as follows. The course consists of three chapters, kinematics, dynamics, and work and energy. Each part starts with the theory and includes definitions, examples and concludes with a set of solved problems.

The kinematics part of the lectures gives the student introductory notions of the movement of point objects. This includes studying linear, 2D and 3D motion in different systems of coordinates (Cartesian, polar, spherical, ...). In addition, the kinematics is concluded with the study of relative movement of objects.

The second part of the manuscript introduces elementary concepts of the dynamics of point objects. Namely, Newton's laws of motion are given with emphasis on external forces acting on objects, conservation law of linear momentum (quantity of motion), and the laws related to some forces appearing in physical systems.

Lastly, elementary concepts of work and energy are discussed in the third part of this manuscript. In particular, the student should learn different forms of mechanical energy (kinetic energy, potential energy) and the relation of potential energy with some force fields (e.g., gravity). Moreover, the study of non-conservative forces is also given.

Concluding, the manuscript has many appendices in the end containing some technical details (e.g. physical units, mathematical formulae and identities, bibliographies, ...). Furthermore, the reader may consult the references given in the Bibliography section for more details about the topics discussed in these lecture notes.

That being said, I hope that the student will find this work useful and helpful in understanding classical mechanics of point objects. Also, I would like to mention that all comments, corrections and feedback are welcome and may be sent to:

houhou.oussama@univ-medea.dz