Colloquium on the history of mechanics

Yesterday I gave a talk at the math department in Lund titled A brief history of geometric mechanics.

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To talk on the history of such an extremely vast field means, of course, you have to make choices; I had to leave out many principal contributors (otherwise it would be dull: a long list of scientists, each one’s work summarized in a sentence).

The story I told began in 1609, when Johannes Kepler published Astronomia nova, and ended in 1966, when Vladimir Arnold showed that Euler’s equations of hydrodynamics describe geodesics on a group of diffeomorphisms. In-between I had Newton, Euler, Lagrange, Hamilton, Lie, Poincaré, and Noether. The slides are available here.