Evgeny Mikhailovich Lifshitz (1915–1985)

As was his previous volume, it is extremely concise on certain topics (so that you will be left to do the necessary legwork yourself) and more verbose on very specific topics. However, its concision does lend itself to showing the simple core of the theory. It is definitely recommended that this text be accompanied by those that are more verbose (and provide more problem sets) in the areas of general relativity and electrodynamics.

This is the perfect example of why suffering any form of brain trauma is a bad plan. Once upon a time, I could *almost* keep up with this series. Now... I can sometimes almost remember what keeping up with this was like. When I was able to keep up, it was awesome. It's still awesome from a layman's perspective, but I have to spend ages running the numbers now, instead of, "This makes sense," And just know I'm good to go.

Grr. Yay. And more yay, since I actually sat down to re-read some and show more more or less kept up without having my brain squirm. show less

The definitive work on the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulation of mechanics. Be wary that you should have a working knowledge of differential geometry or a mastery of analytic geometry as it will be fully applied to physical problems. It is also very dense, but very well written. By density, one means that a typical sentence contains the information that an entire chapter in an undergraduate text would spend time expounding. It is up to the mature reader to motivate any necessary show more expansion of the material presented in the text. show less

Launda is a god!