
A Student's Guide to Maxwell's Equations
by Daniel Fleisch · first published 2008
4mentions
2recommended by
4HN commenters
2016–2024first – last mentioned
50% recommend50% neutral
Gauss's law for electric fields, Gauss's law for magnetic fields, Faraday's law, and the Ampere-Maxwell law are four of the most influential equations in science. In this guide for students, each equation is the subject of an entire chapter, with detailed, plain-language explanations of the physical meaning of each symbol in the equation, for both the integral and differential forms. The final chapter shows how Maxwell's equations may be combined to produce the wave equation, the basis for the electromagnetic theory of light. This book is a wonderful resource for undergraduate and graduate cou
Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

…Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone (John C. Baez, Mike Stay) - An Illustrated Guide to Relativity (Tatsu Takeuchi) - The Mathematics Of Quantum Mechanics (Martin Laforest) - A Student's Guide to Maxwell's Equations (Daniel Fleisch) or if you're also interested in a visual guide, I wrote one as well: https://github.com/photonlines/Intuitive-Guide-to-Maxwells-Equations - Introduction to Elementary Particles (David…
on “Ask HN: Serious mathematics books that can replace a good teacher?” ↗Years ago I completed a post-graduate degree in physics, and although I had studied Maxwell's equations, I didn't have a good "feel" for them. I recently read "A Student's Guide to Maxwell's Equations", and it was perfect for me - it explained enough of the maths to understand the equations, without having to first learn differential geometry. https://www.cambridge.org/highereducation/books/a-students-g...
on “Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]” ↗…Grad, Curl, and all that (http://www.amazon.com/Div-Grad-Curl-All-That/dp/0393925161). Back in my era it was the 1st edition of the book, not the 4th. I see another book with good recommendations, A Student's Guide to Maxwell's Equations (http://www.amazon.com/Students-Guide-Maxwells-Equations/dp/0...) but I have not read that one. Div, Grad, Curl helped a bit, but what really made it click for me was an excellent professor some other…
on “Feynman’s proof of the Maxwell equations” ↗…recently went though a couple of books on Bayes and computer vision. I would have used Mathematica - refreshing my memory. - I sometimes need to do some stats / analysis - Refresh... - I recently picked up a Student's guide to Maxwell's equations - Refresh... - I need to help my children with Calculus... If I had been using a high level tool my whole life I think I actually would make use of calculus and other mathematics. I'm curious if anyone…
on “I no longer understand my PhD dissertation” ↗