A warm welcome to all first-year students! We’re excited to begin this semester’s Ensemble sessions with a lecture tailored especially for you. Our topic is Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics, ideas that form the backbone of physics and appear everywhere from vibration of molecules to quantum systems and field theory.

In this session, we will start with the calculus of variations, exploring some famous examples, then move on to Hamilton’s principle and the Lagrangian formalism with its advantages. From there, we’ll transition to the Hamiltonian formalism, discuss its properties, and introduce canonical transformations and Poisson brackets. If time permits, we’ll also touch on canonical invariants, Liouville’s theorem, and Noether’s theorem.

Details of the session:

Speaker: Sriraj Chandra (3rd Year UG)
Date: 13th August (Wednesday)
Time: 9:30 PM
Venue: F-08A, OPB

Lecture notes, link to the video, and pictures taken during session can be found in this folder.