Classical and Celestial Mechanics: The Recife Lectures

Description

This text brings together a number of lectures given between 1993 and 1999 as part of a series hosted by the Federal University of Pernambuco, in which internationally established researchers lectured in Recife, Brazil, on classical or celestial mechanics. The material presented includes a balance of pure and applied research and of complete and incomplete results. The contributors to this volume are Dieter Schmidt, Ernesto Perez-Chavela, Mark Levi, Placido Taboas, Jack Hale, Jair Koiller, Hildeberto Cabral, Florin Diacu and Alain Albouy. The topics covered include central configurations and relative equilibria for the N-body problem, singularities of the N-body problem, the two-body problem, normal forms of Hamiltonian systems and stability of equilibria, applications to celestial mechanics of Poincare's compactification, the motion of the moon, geometrical methods in mechanics, momentum maps and geometric phases, holonomy for gyrostats, microswimming and bifurcation from families of periodic solutions.

Hildeberto Cabral is Professor of Mathematics at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil. He has published on periodic solutions, stability, and other topics in Hamiltonian systems and celestial mechanics. Florin Diacu is Professor of Mathematics and Director of the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences at the University of Victoria. He is the author of "Singularities of the N-Body Problem" and "An Introduction to Differential Equations" and coauthor of "Celestial Encounters" (Princeton).

"This is an excellent text and reference. I know of no comparable book. Its scope is wide, and the quality of the authors is extremely high."-James Meiss, University of Colorado, Boulder "These lectures, in addition to containing some new significant results, perform the service of collecting together the material on diverse topics in celestial mechanics in an accessible form."-Edward Belbruno, Princeton University