a First Course in General Relativity

Suitable for a one-semester course in general relativity for senior undergraduates or beginning graduate students, this text clarifies the mathematical aspects of Einstein's theory of relativity without sacrificing physical understanding.

Suitable for a one-semester course in general relativity for senior undergraduates or beginning graduate students, this text clarifies the mathematical aspects of Einstein's theory of relativity without sacrificing physical understanding.

This book presents a modern introduction to analytical and numerical techniques for solving ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Contrary to the traditional format—the theorem-and-proof format—the book is focusing on analytical and numerical methods. The book supplies a variety of problems and examples, ranging from the elementary to the advanced level, to introduce and study the mathematics of ODEs. The analytical part of the book deals with solution techniques for scalar first-order and second-order linear ODEs, and systems of linear ODEs—with a special focus on the Laplace transform, operator techniques and power series solutions. In the numerical part, theoretical and practical aspects of Runge-Kutta methods for solving initial-value problems and shooting methods for linear two-point boundary-value problems are considered.