Excellent Adventures | Classical Mechanics Part I

Part I: Calculus of Variations.

Conner Herndon, now a graduate student in Dr. Flavio Fenton's lab, is giving a series of lectures on Lagrangians and Hamiltonians. In this video, he derives the Euler-Lagrange formula and proved that the shortest distance between two points in indeed a straight line.

This video serves as the foundation knowledge for future lectures, so please start here.

[paesanng]

Dat moment when a metal head is a really good lecturer. Thanks

[christophermsb]

This is a good quick and dirty introduction to calculus of variations. He hits all the major points.

[rontoolsie]

Clear explanation....but I think you don't set epsilon be be zero at its end points...rather you demand the variation of the function be zero at the end points....epsilon is a scaling value that applies equally to all points of the function, and if it is zero at the end points, it would also be zero everywhere else, and the original function would be returned unchanged.

[AmartyaGhoshk]

Great explanation...Is this a graduate or an undergraduate class?

[cilvaable]

Can anybody explain to me the difference between "Physics: Classical Mechanics" and Engineering: Dynamics"?