SICM - Definition and Overview

Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics (SICM) is a textbook published in 2001 by MIT Press written by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors Gerald Jay Sussman and Jack Wisdom. The book (ISBN 0-262-019455-4) is used at MIT to teach a class in advanced classical mechanics, starting with Lagrange's equations and proceeding through canonical perturbation theory.

Sussman wrote "Classical mechanics is deceptively simple. It is surprisingly easy to get the right answer with fallacious reasoning or without the real understanding. To address this problem Jack Wisdom and I, with help from Hardy Mayer, have written a book with the title of this talk (Struture and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics) and are teaching a class at MIT that uses computational techniques to communicate a deeper understanding of Classical mechanics. We use computational algorithms to express the methods used to analyze dynamical phenomena. Expressing the methods in a computer language forces them to be unambiguous and computationally effective. Formulating a method as a computer-executable program and debugging that program is a powerful exercise in the learning process. Also, once formalized procedurally, a mathematical idea becomes a tool that can be used directly to compute results."

See also

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

External links

• Official SICM site, including the full text in HTML (http://www-mitpress.mit.edu/sicm/)

• MIT class site using SICM, including pointers for download of support software (http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/~gjs/6946/)

• Homepage for a talk on SICM (http://www.eecs.mit.edu/AY01-02/events/8.html)