CISM c1311 course: Differential geometric methods for multi-body-systems simulations (part I)
Spent a week at the International Center for Mechanical Sciences in Udine, Italy, for a seminar on Differential Geometric Methods for Multi-Body Dynamics Simulations. At five days, of course, all it can offer is a taste of the field, and this blog post is itself just a summary of a summary, but the field itself is very interesting. Indeed, that's why I went there. Ever since about 2007 or so I started bumping into papers about group theoretic methods used for system simulation. The mathematics itself is beautiful, but there were many times where I might as well have been smashing my head into the research papers for all the good reading them did. In particular, I was curious what a specific function meant, and why its inverse looked a certain way. The papers I saw it in just dropped those in like they were obvious. Taking pen to paper revealed the calculations to be far from trivial. And I found out, at the seminar, they aren't supposed to be trivial, so I feel less stupid. B