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Jack Wisdom

Jack Wisdom is Breene M. Kerr Professor of Planetary Science in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Titles by This Author

This textbook takes an innovative approach to the teaching of classical mechanics, emphasizing the development of general but practical intellectual tools to support the analysis of nonlinear Hamiltonian systems. The development is organized around a progressively more sophisticated analysis of particular natural systems and weaves examples throughout the presentation. Explorations of phenomena such as transitions to chaos, nonlinear resonances, and resonance overlap to help the student to develop appropriate analytic tools for understanding.