Vectorial Mechanics - Summary of Reviews

Summary of Reviews

There were significant reviews given near the time of original publication.

G.J.Whitrow:

Although many books have been published in recent years in which vector and tensor methods are used for solving problems in geometry and mathematical physics, there has been a lack of first-class treatises which explain the methods in full detail and are nevertheless suitable for the undergraduate student. In applied mathematics no book has appeared till now which is comparable with Hardy's Pure Mathematics. ... Just as in Hardy's classic, a new note is struck at the very start: a precise definition is given of the concept "free vector", analogous to the Frege-Russell definition of "cardinal number." According to Milne, a free vector is the class of all its representations, a typical representation being defined in the customary manner. From a pedagogic point of view, however, the reviewer wonders whether it might have been better to draw attention at this early stage to a concrete instance of a free vector. The student familiar with physical concepts which have magnitude and position, but not direction, should be made to realise from the very beginning that the free vector is not merely "fundamental in discussing systems of position vectors and systems of line-vectors", but occurs naturally in its own right, as there are physical concepts which have magnitude and direction but not position, e.g. the couple in statics, and the angular velocity of a rigid body. Although the necessary existence theorems must be established at a later stage, and Milne's rigorous proofs are particularly welcome, there is no reason why some instances of free vectors should not be mentioned at this point."

Daniel C. Lewis:

The reviewer has long felt that the role of vector analysis in mechanics has been much overemphasized. It is true that the fundamental equations of motion in their various forms, especially in the case of rigid bodies, can be derived with greatest economy of thought by use of vectors (assuming that the requisite technique has already been developed); but once the equations have been set up, the usual procedure is to drop vector methods in their solution. If this position can be successfully refuted, this has been done in the present work, the most novel feature of which is to solve the vector differential equations by vector methods without ever writing down the corresponding scalar differential equations obtained by taking components. The author has certainly been successful in showing that this can be done in fairly simple, though nontrivial, cases. To give an example of a definitely nontrivial problem solved in this way, one might mention the nonholonomic problem afforded by the motion of a sphere rolling on a rough inclined plane or on a rough spherical surface. The author's methods are interesting and aesthetically satisfying and therefore deserve the widest publication even if they partake of the nature of a tour de force.