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Integrals in a physics course



When I was an undergraduate at Harvard, Karl Strauch, in an e&m course,
assigned a problem that led to a nasty integral that none of us could find
in our Dwight's Tables of Integrals (remember that? remember who Dwight
was?) or integrate on our own - so we had to ask him for help. He didn't
know the answer right away, but said he'd get back to us. It was about two
weeks before he had the solution. Unable to figure it out either, he had
consulted Andrew Gleason (solver of one of Hilbert's problems) in the math
department, who had eventually found it in a work by Gauss. So we didn't
feel too stupid after all. If I remembered it I would stick it into
Mathematica just for fun. How things have changed! I remember once asking
students on an exam to make a rough qualitative sketch of the function
a/r^2 - b/r (a, b > 0) and being told, irately, that "you can't do that
without real numbers and a graphing calculator."


Laurent Hodges, Professor of Physics
12 Physics Hall, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011-3160
lhodges@iastate.edu http://www.public.iastate.edu/~lhodges