add & Edited
By:
Taryono S.Pd.
(Lulusan Cum Laude FPMIPA UPI dan Staf Pengajar Tridaya
&
Arip Nurahman
Department of Physics
Faculty of Sciences and Mathematics, Indonesia University of Education
and
Follower Open Course Ware at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, USA
Department of Physics
http://web.mit.edu/physics/
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/index.htm
&
Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering
http://web.mit.edu/aeroastro/www/
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Aeronautics-and-Astronautics/index.htm
Mathematical physics refers to development of
mathematical methods for application to problems in
physics.
Scope of the subject
The
Journal of Mathematical Physics defines this area as: "the application of mathematics to problems in physics and the development of mathematical methods suitable for such applications and for the formulation of physical theories."
There are several distinct branches of mathematical physics, and these roughly correspond to particular historical periods. The theory of
partial differential equations (and the related areas of
variational calculus,
Fourier analysis,
potential theory, and
vector analysis) are perhaps most closely associated with mathematical physics.
These were developed intensively from the second half of the eighteenth century (by, for example,
D'Alembert,
Euler, and
Lagrange) until the 1930s. Physical applications of these developments include
hydrodynamics,
celestial mechanics,
elasticity theory,
acoustics,
thermodynamics,
electricity,
magnetism, and
aerodynamics.
The theory of
atomic spectra (and, later,
quantum mechanics) developed almost concurrently with the mathematical fields of
linear algebra, the
spectral theory of
operators, and more broadly,
functional analysis. These constitute the mathematical basis of another branch of mathematical physics.
The
special and
general theories of relativity require a rather different type of
mathematics. This was
group theory: and it played an important role in both
quantum field theory and
differential geometry. This was, however, gradually supplemented by
topology in the mathematical description of
cosmological as well as quantum field theory
phenomena.
Statistical mechanics forms a separate field, which is closely related with the more mathematical
ergodic theory and some parts of
probability theory.
There are increasing interactions between
combinatorics and physics, in particular statistical physics.
The usage of the term 'Mathematical physics' is sometimes idiosyncratic. Certain parts of mathematics that initially arose from the development of
physics are
not considered parts of mathematical physics, while other closely related fields are. For example,
ordinary differential equations and
symplectic geometry are generally viewed as purely
mathematical disciplines, whereas
dynamical systems and
Hamiltonian mechanics belong to mathematical physics.
Author: TAI L. CHOW
Was born and raised in China. He received a BS degree in physics from the National Taiwan University, a Masters degree in physics from Case Western Reserve University, and a PhD in physics from the University of Rochester.
Since 1969, Dr Chow has been in the Department of Physics at California State University, Stanislaus, and served as department chairman for 17 years, until 1992. He served as Visiting Professor of Physics at University of California (at Davis and Berkeley) during his sabbatical years.
He also worked as Summer Faculty Research Fellow at Stanford University and at NASA. Dr Chow has published more than 35 articles in physics journals and is the author of two textbooks and a solutions manual.
Sumber:
1. Wikipedia
2. Google book
Ucapan Terima Kasih
Kepada Ibunda Roswati Mudjiarto
