On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 4:23 PM, Luke <[email protected]> wrote: > > One reason to have a custom Lagrangian class is that it helps keep > track of systems where you have a large number of > particles/bodies/constraints/interacting forces. For simple systems > you can surely write the Lagrangian in a line or two, but for more > interesting systems, it becomes onerous and error prone to do this > "manually". Having a class which allows you to pass it a list of > particles/bodies, and the forces/torques acting on them, as well as > any kinematic constraints that may be present, greatly simplifies the > work the user must do and reduces the likelihood of making a mistake. > I see many reasons to have a custom Lagrangian class.
I can see a reason to have a class to hold the Lagrangian (i.e., the work-energy expression), but the Euler-Lagrange equation itself should be broken out separately since it has uses far beyond mechanics. I've been thinking about writing support for general Calculus of Variations in SymPy, but it's likely to wait until the end of the summer at the earliest. Cheers, Tim. -- Tim Lahey PhD Candidate, Systems Design Engineering University of Waterloo http://about.me/tjlahey -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy?hl=en.
