Among the first courses taken by graduate students in physics in North America is Clas-
Classical Mechanics. This book is a contemporary text for such a course, containing material
traditionally found in the classical textbooks written through the early 1970s as well as
recent developments that have transformed classical mechanics to a subject of significant
contemporary research. It is an attempt to merge the traditional and the modern in one
coherent presentation.
When we started writing the book we planned merely to update the classical book by
Saletan and Cromer A971) (SC) by adding more modern topics, mostly by emphasizing
differential geometric and nonlinear dynamical methods. But that book was written when
the frontier was largely quantum field theory, and the frontier has changed and is now
moving in many different directions. Moreover, classical mechanics occupies a different
position in contemporary physics than it did when SC was written. Thus this book is not
merely an update of SC. Every page has been written anew and the book now includes
many new topics that were not even in existence when SC was written. (Nevertheless,
traces of SC remain and are evident in the frequent references to it.)
From the late seventeenth century well into the nineteenth, classical mechanics was
one of the main driving forces in the development of physics, interacting strongly with
developments in mathematics, both by borrowing and lending. The topics developed by
its main protagonists, Newton, Lagrange, Euler, Hamilton, and Jacobi among others, form
the basis of the traditional material.