Back in April I made the audacious claim that I was going to create a new series, and that it would launch in July. Well, July has come and almost gone, with no new Welch Labs series to show for it.
I've made some good progress, but all the pieces just haven't come together yet.
I couldn't be happier with the topic - waves, applications of complex numbers, and Euler's formula cover an fascinating and impossibly large swath of physics. Thus far I've honed in on a fascinating narrative that I'm thinking the series will turn on: the vibrating string. The vibrating string was at the center of the development of an astounding amount of mathematics, and offers some really beautiful scientific and mathematical mysteries.
A lesson I'm quickly learning about my topic of choice is the huge range of mathematical rigor it covers - literally from elementary to graduate school. For this reason I'm considering breaking up this topic across several short series (ideally 3-5 episodes each) - I'm thinking that series one will require very little mathematical background, series two will require knowledge of pre-calculus and complex numbers, and series three will require calculus. I'm hoping to launch the first series in August or September.
Finally, I'd like to share some of the interesting resources I've come across thus far.
Great Books
Good Books
Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis)
A Course in Mathematical Methods for Physicists
Origins in Acoustics: The Science of Sound from Antiquity to the Age of Newton
A Source Book in Mathematics, 1200-1800 (Princeton Legacy Library)