Hi all,
I would like to form an internet reading group for Sussman and Wisdom's
book _Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics_. I wasn't able
to find any existing mailing lists dedicated to SICM, so I have gone ahead
and created a Google Group for the cause:
http://groups.google.com/group/sicm
For those not familiar with the book, the entire text is available online:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/SICM/
In a nutshell, this book is a tour of Classical Mechanics which uses a
nonstandard notation which is intended to be completely unambiguous
(inspired in part by Spivak's _Calculus on Manifolds_), and
everything--actions, lagrangians, etc--is implemented in Scheme (a dialect
of Lisp), in the tradition of the well-known computer science text,
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
Tobin