Classical Electromagnetic Theory

Book excerpt: In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer (1564-1642) This book is a second edition of “Classical Electromagnetic Theory” which derived from a set of lecture notes compiled over a number of years of teaching elect- magnetic theory to fourth year physics and electrical engineering students. These students had a previous exposure to electricity and magnetism, and the material from the ?rst four and a half chapters was presented as a review. I believe that the book makes a reasonable transition between the many excellent elementary books such as Gri?th’s Introduction to Electrodynamics and the obviously graduate level books such as Jackson’s Classical Electrodynamics or Landau and Lifshitz’ Elect- dynamics of Continuous Media. If the students have had a previous exposure to Electromagnetictheory, allthematerialcanbereasonablycoveredintwosemesters. Neophytes should probable spend a semester on the ?rst four or ?ve chapters as well as, depending on their mathematical background, the Appendices B to F. For a shorter or more elementary course, the material on spherical waves, waveguides, and waves in anisotropic media may be omitted without loss of continuity.