About the Book:

For the Third Edition of this successful undergraduate text, the author has made a number of changes to improve the presentation and clarify some of the arguments, and has also brought several of the applications up to date. The new material includes an elementary, descriptive introduction to the idea behind the new science of chaos.

The overall of objectives of the book are unchanged: to lead the students to a thorough understanding of the basic concepts of variations and waves, to show how these concepts unify a wide variety of familiar physics, and to open doors to advanced topics which they illuminate. From elementary beginnings the underlying theory is carefully developed with the aid of appropriate mechanical models. The theoretical presentation of such topics as free and forced vibrations, damping travelling and standing waves, energy propagation, attenuation and dispersion is punctuated by chapters in which the various physical examples are discussed, with due emphasis on the numerical sizes of the quantities involved. Each section of the book contains. There approximately 180 problems to which all numerical answers are provided, together with hints for their solutions.

The book is designed both for use as a text for an initial undergraduate course on vibrations and waves, and for a reference at later stages when more advanced topics or applications are met. As such it is suitable for undergraduates at all levels in physics or any physics-based discipline concerned with vibrations and waves.

Contents: 

1.    Free Vibrations

2.    Free Vibrations in Physics

3.    Damping

4.    Damping in Physics

5.    Forced Vibrations

6.    Forced Vibrations in Physics

7.    Anharmonic Vibrations

8.    Two-coordinate Vibrations

9.    Non-dispersive waves

10. Non-dispersive waves in physics

11. Fourier Theory

12. Dispersion

13. Water Waves

14. Electromagnetic Waves

15. De Broglie Waves

16. Solitary Waves

17. Plane Waves at boundaries

18. Diffraction