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What is the best way to learn GR with Mathematica as an undergrad?

Posted 10 years ago

My nephew is currently learning General Relativity. I see a lot of assorted links on the wolfram library, various packages, and such things, but I know current versions of Mathematica has built in functionality concerning tensors. Most of the books I've found are outdated or very expensive low volume prints.

Hoping for some guidance here as to the best learning path, ebook or courses, something unified and accessible to an undergraduate.

Thanks!

POSTED BY: Mike Reynolds
6 Replies
Posted 10 years ago

Yes. It handles them, and prints them so they look right and it can show either the symbolic form, or actually carry it out if you have specified things like the metric tensor, etc. It can also handle Einstein summations. I could send you a notebook with some examples if you give me your email. I would send a pdf; since you don't have the package.

POSTED BY: Kevin McCann

My e-mail address is in my profile.

POSTED BY: Frank Kampas
Posted 10 years ago

I would strongly recommend David Park and Renan Cabrera's Tensorial package. There is a bit of a learning curve, but if you use the included documentation along with a set of notes on GR from David, which I think he would be happy to send you, you can get there quickly. One huge advantage of Tensorial over the built-in Tensor package is that the superscript/subscript notation looks the way it does in texts. If you would like more information about this, contact me. The website for Tensorial website is http://home.comcast.net/~djmpark/TensorialPage.html. I would also highly recommend Tom Moore's book: http://amazon.com/General-Relativity-Workbook-Thomas-Moore/dp/1891389823.

POSTED BY: Kevin McCann

When you say the package handles superscript/subscript notation, do you mean that it handles covariant and contravariant coordinates?

POSTED BY: Frank Kampas

There are some Mathematica programs implementing GR calculations at this link:

http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~gravitybook/mathematica.html

POSTED BY: Frank Kampas
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