Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: The exponential RC discharge opportunity



My favorite is the rectangular hyperbola revolved around one of
its axes. The volume integral converges for this beast, but the
surface area integraldoes not. Thus one can fill it with a finite
volume of paint, but one requires an infinite amount of paint to
cover the inside surface!

Yesterday I had to integrate the Planckian distribution to find
the number density of photons in a blackbody radiation field*.
Maple refused to do the integral. Abramowitz and Stegun struck
out on it. http://www.integrals.com was no help.

Guess what. I found an excellent treatment on the web! You might
want to take a look at http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~eww6n . I
have found an error or two in what is here, but I'm impressed.

Leigh

*Yes, I know it's a standard problem in undergrad physics - I had
assigned it to my class, and I had forgot how to do it.