We announce the release of a new book, of title Fourier Transforms for Chemistry, which is in the form of a Maple worksheet.  This book is freely available through Maple Application Centre, either as a Maple worksheet with no output from commands or as a .pdf file with all output and plots.

            This interactive electronic book in the form of a Maple worksheet comprises six chapters containing Maple commands, plus an overview 0 as an introduction.  The chapters have content as follows.

  -   1    continuous Fourier transformation

  -   2    electron diffraction of a gaseous sample

  -   3    xray diffraction of a crystal and a powder

  -   4    microwave spectrum of a gaseous sample

  -   5    infrared and Raman spectra of a liquid sample

  -   6    nuclear magnetic resonance of various samples

            This book will be useful in courses of physical chemistry or devoted to the determination of molecular structure by physical methods.  Some content, duly acknowledged, has been derived and adapted from other authors, with permission.

Download pendulumprojection.mw

Most of the time in multivariable calculus the vectors we are decomposing with respect to a given direction are attached to a specific point and this "orthogonal decomposition" should be visualized as a triplet of vectors with initial point at that given point such that the two projections sum to the original vector. Keep in mind our high school physics pendulum example where we need to evaluate both the component of the downward gravitational force along the tangential direction of motion of the pendulum for the equations of motion as well as along the perpendicular direction to the motion to evaluate the tension in the string or wire holding the pendulum mass.

We create an Explorable graphic to visualize this idea and then create an animation which requires a bit of Maple expert user knowledge to accomplish (thanks Maplesoft!). A delayed evaluation of the arrow command from the plot package is required in order to animate that arrow so that it waits for the animation command to feed it actual numerical values for the vector to be plotted.

My worksheet URL:
http://www34.homepage.villanova.edu/robert.jantzen/courses/mat2500/handouts/pendulumprojection.mw