Having acquired the foundational aspects in the Mechanics course, students in this course will be exposed to more sophisticated ways of dealing problems of classical mechanics using advanced mathematical tools.

The content includes recap of basic mechanics, calculus of variations, generalized coordinates, Lagrangian mechanics, Hamilton’s principle of least action, Lagrange equations and their applications, two body central force problem, reduction to an effective one-body problem in one dimension and its solution, nature of solutions in different potentials, rotating frames, centrifugal and Coriolis forces, Foucault pendulum, classical scattering theory, Rutherford scattering, rigid body rotation, principal moments and principal axes, precession of a spinning top, precession of Earth, Euler’s equations and applications, introduction to special and general theories of relativity.