====== lectures in theoretical physics ======

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Arnold Sommerfeld is a great teacher. He trained four Nobel prize winners: Werner Heisenberg,  Wolfgang Pauli, Peter Debye and  Hans Bethe. He does not skip any steps in his explanations. His writing is concise but thorough. He is very precise in his explanations. You can read more about Arnold Sommerfeld's life at The MacTutor Mathematics History page.  [[https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Sommerfeld/]]

 
<tabbox Abstract> 
His lectures cover classical physics. This is a six volume set that covers Mechanics, Mechanics of Deformable Bodies, Electrodynamics, Optics, Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics and Partial Differential Equations. The Partial Differential Equations Volume has a section on Greeen's functions. These books were used in conjunction with a 6 semester course Sommerfeld taught. The books Are available as *.pdf downloads from Academic Press.
 Arnold Sommerfeld died in 1951 and was unable to complete the volume on Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics. The publisher enlisted the help of a physicist to complete it. 


<tabbox Why is it interesting?>

From the Foreword by P. P. Ewald:

"Sommerfeld was over 70 years old, and retired after 40 years of teaching, when he committed his lectures to paper.  He did it with a sense of double obligation:
  - To preserve through a crisis (WW II) the achievements that had carried physics to great triumphs.
  - To bequeath to a younger generation of physicists the valuable analytic tools that had been shaped on the classical problems."   

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