ChapterZero

I’ve tried to establish the precedent of reading up on the topics that I’ll over the following week, on the weekend. This weekend, I haven’t been very successful, which makes me grateful that I chose to do this, because that means it will save me time in understanding the topics later when I have to. Two things I’m having trouble with: uniform plane waves, and the superposition integral.

The superposition integral is for my EE Analysis course, and is just the convolution integral, in the context of determining the response of a fixed linear system, but the book I’m reading approaches it from a horribly thorough viewpoint. Which means, if I can understand it from this book, I really understand it– so even though I have a good idea of what is going on intuitively, I’m trying to master all the math behind it. I’ve given up for the moment, and moved onto my next topic…

Uniform planar waves are supposedly the simplest solution to the wave equation, a vector differential equation that governs how EM waves propagate through space. So, I’m a little troubled by the fact that I’m not grasping the concepts as easily as I would like. There are way too many equations, accompanying definitions, and shifts between phasor domain and time domain, and not nearly enough pictures (actually, none) for me to try to grasp this on a purely intuitive level before approaching it mathematically. So I have to build a picture of the situation based on the math– but I need a picture to grok the math– a tortured web.

It is fun, though, to have these problems. It gives me something worthwhile to do.

Possibly relevant posts:

• Dif. Eq. (8/29/2002)
• Taxi-cab geometry? (9/15/2004)
• Progress in Computer Algebra (3/19/2004)