In an effort to get a better understanding of classical electrodynamics, I’ve begun writing up some notes on the subject from a rather “backwards” point of view. You’ll see what I mean when you start reading them. You can download the notes as a .pdf here.

A few things: first of all, these notes are nowhere near complete. I will probably include the lagrangian formulation of electrodynamics in the section with gauge transformations, as it is an obvious thing to do there. This also requires that I introduce the Minkowski metric, and therefore the next lecture pretty much has to be a discussion of special relativity.

I’m debating inserting a section on the mathematics of metric spaces into the second lecture, so that I’m not leaving too much floating out there. However, this is going to make the second lecture enormous, which I guess isn’t that much of a problem. As always, comments and suggestions would be appreciated.

Also, please note that as I update these notes, I’ll be deleting the older copies from the server to save a bit of space and make the bookkeeping easier. You are more than welcome to download the notes, but please remember that I wrote them, and that I’d like a little credit if someone ever happens to use them on their own. That said, enjoy the read!