meam2110

If kinematics describes motion, dynamics describes forces. That’s just \(F = ma\) right… right… RIGHT?
Ah. The naivety!
A lot of this class dealt with systems I’d seen plenty of times: robot arms, orbiting planets, cars on tracks… the usual! But it was a true challenge to break down complex motion and forces using math and differential equations.
The results were sometimes really cool. The math, derived from the seemingly simple equations I learned in high school, revealed some traits of motion that weren’t always immediately intuitive to me, like the Dzhanibekov effect (or wing nut in space) and tennis racket theorem.
This class wasn’t just rote number crunching though. Dr. Posa gave us some cool exposure to the fresher side of dynamics, by sharing some examples from his research and having us build our own Python package for dynamics calculations and simulations over the course of the semester.
Repo to the Python package I built over the semester is here!