Courses

Prerequisites: a working knowledge of high school algebra, trigonometry, and physics. Some familiarity with calculus is useful but not essential.

This course is a comprehensive, one-semester introduction to the essential ideas and mathematical structures underlying Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. Among the topics covered will be: the relativity of simultaneity, time dilation, Lorentz contraction, velocity combination laws, time dilation over large distances, the Lorentz transformation, spacetime diagrams, the basic (seeming) paradoxes of special relativity, relativistic equations of motion and E = mc2.