Another Formulation of Maxwell's Equations.

Discussion in 'Physics & Math' started by Willem, Nov 1, 2019.

  1. Willem Banned Banned

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    We work out another formulation of Maxwell's Equations using the electromagnetic 4-force. See the uploaded file. Sorry about the formatting being removed.
     

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  3. przyk squishy Valued Senior Member

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    You really want to learn LaTeX for that sort of thing.

    An article What's Wrong with these Equations? by N. David Mermin is also highly recommended reading if you're going to write text with a lot of math embedded in it. A copy is available at http://www.ai.mit.edu/courses/6.899/papers/mermin.pdf.
     

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  5. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    przyk:

    Everybody who writes papers (or anything) with maths in it should read that article you linked. I was fortunate enough to have somebody explain these principles to me a long time ago, but I know a lot of otherwise well-qualified people who are unaware of them.
     
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  7. przyk squishy Valued Senior Member

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    Similar here. The PhD student who was supervising me at the time told me "equations are part of your prose and should be punctuated" back when I was writing my master's thesis. The "Good Samaritan" rule didn't occur to me until I read Mermin though.

    I also thought Why Academics Stink at Writing by Steven Pinker (https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/why_academics_stink_at_writing.pdf) gives good advice on non-mathematical aspects of scientific writing when I read it, e.g., avoiding excessive and unnecessary use of jargon and acronyms* and avoiding boring "dead weight" text like that "the structure of this paper is as follows..." paragraph you'll often see in papers.


    *One thing I try to keep in mind when preparing a presentation or writing a technical paper is that people have a short-term working memory that can hold only a handful of objects at any given time. So you really want to minimise the number of acronyms, definitions, variables, indices, etc., that listeners and readers will have to remember the meanings of at any given time to follow what you're doing.
     

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