Errata

This page tracks corrections made in this MyST edition relative to the LibreTexts source that was crawled and converted to Markdown (see scripts/html_to_myst.py and scripts/build_book.py). Two kinds of defects are recorded separately below: issues introduced purely by the HTML → Markdown conversion, and issues that were already present in the underlying LibreTexts/PDF text and have been corrected here for readability and correctness.

Conversion defects (fixed)¶

These were artifacts of the automated HTML → MyST conversion, not the underlying textbook content. The _table() method in scripts/html_to_myst.py originally built table cells with self._inline(td), which converts <br> to a literal newline, and the page-level normalize_inline_math() pass converted any \[...\] display math to a multi-line $$ block wherever it occurred — including inside table cells. Markdown pipe tables require one physical line per row, so any cell containing a <br> or block math broke the table into malformed extra rows. _table() has since been rewritten to force inline math and collapse multi-line cell content onto one physical line, rendering as a pipe table when every cell fits on one line and as a list-table directive (which tolerates richer cell content) otherwise, so this does not recur on the next npm run convert.

• back/glossary.md — the entire glossary table (all 87 entries) was broken below the first entry that contained a formula. Eleven entries (Abbreviated action, Canonical coordinates, Characteristic function, Euler’s hydrodynamic equation, Euler-Lagrange equation, Fermat’s principle, Newton’s First-order integrals, Generalized energy theorem, Hamilton’s stationary-action principle, Inertia tensor, Poisson brackets) had their definitions collapsed onto a single line with inline math. The Euler’s equations for rigid-body rotation and Jacobian entries used the eqnarray/equation LaTeX environments without $ delimiters at all, so they rendered as raw text instead of math; both are now wrapped in $...$ (eqnarray converted to KaTeX-compatible aligned). Also removed: a leftover, book-irrelevant LibreTexts template row (“Words (or words that have the same definition) ... Eg. ‘Genetic, Hereditary, DNA’”) that had been pulled in verbatim from the glossary plugin’s boilerplate instructions and rendered as if it were the book’s first glossary entry.

• chapters/ch-15-advanced-hamiltonian-mechanics.md — Table 15.1 (Hamilton–Jacobi summary table): three cells that each contain two stacked equations were splitting the table; now renders as a list-table with each cell’s equations collapsed onto one line.

• chapters/ch-19-mathematical-methods-for-classical-mechanics.md — four tables of curvilinear-coordinate formulas (polar, cylindrical, spherical, and the Frenet–Serret/arc-length table) had “Unit vectors” and “Time derivatives of unit vectors” cells with 2–3 stacked equations each, and one cell containing a 3×3 rotation-matrix equation spread across ~14 lines with blank-line padding; all now render as list-table directives with each cell’s equations collapsed onto one line.

• chapters/ch-13-rigid-body-rotation.md — a garbled aligned equation block for the perturbed Euler equations (§13.22): \$I_3 − I_1) should read (I_3 − I_1), and a stray \\( between the second and third lines should have been the \\ row separator. Also fixed an adjacent \(\lambda \mu$ (mismatched delimiter) to $\lambda \mu$.

• Stray \$ where a closing inline-math delimiter should have been a plain $ — found in four chapters, each breaking the math immediately after it: chapters/ch-10-nonconservative-systems.md ($m=m_0e^{\Gamma t}$), chapters/ch-04-nonlinear-systems-and-chaos.md ($n\to\infty$), chapters/ch-11-conservative-two-body-central-forces.md ($\mathbf{r}$), chapters/ch-06-lagrangian-dynamics.md ($F_{q_i}^{EXC}$).

• Duplicated words from the source text, corrected in 14 places across chapters 3, 5 (×2), 6, 7, 8, 11 (×2), 12 (×4, including a figure alt text that duplicated its caption), 13 (×2), 15, and 16 — e.g. “the the”, “to to”, “it it”, “frame frame”, “equation Equation”.

Broken cross-references¶

An audit of the original equation cross-reference macros found five citations that did not resolve to a defined target, from LibreTexts end-of-chapter “review” sections that restate results using the original PDF’s equation numbering without re-attaching a label to the restated equations. One was fixed here directly: the citation to equation 7.37 (used in chapters/ch-09-hamiltons-action-principle.md for “Jacobi’s Generalized Energy ... was defined in Equation 7.37”) pointed at an equation in chapters/ch-07-symmetries-invariance-and-the-hamiltonian.md that had lost its label; the definition of $h(\mathbf{q},\dot{\mathbf{q}},t)$ in §7.7 is the only equation in the book matching that description, so the label was restored there.

The book’s subsequent full renumbering pass (which replaced the old cross-reference macros throughout with resolved MyST links) independently reconstructed the three other citations this pass had left unresolved — equation 13.103 (chapters/ch-13-rigid-body-rotation.md), equation 7.38 (chapters/ch-07-symmetries-invariance-and-the-hamiltonian.md), and equation 9.2 (chapters/ch-09-hamiltons-action-principle.md) all now link correctly.

One case remains unresolved:

• chapters/ch-08-hamiltonian-mechanics.md — “Equation (a)” (line ~475, alongside a working link to equation c) has no equation tagged (a) defined nearby in that worked example; the nearest similarly-tagged equation (eq-8-a1) belongs to a different worked example later in the chapter, so it isn’t a safe fix. Left as plain text pending someone with the source PDF confirming the intended target.

Original-text corrections (fixed, tracked here)¶

These appear to be errors in the underlying textbook content itself (not introduced by the Markdown conversion), corrected in this edition:

• chapters/ch-19-mathematical-methods-for-classical-mechanics.md (spherical coordinates table) — the unit vector $\mathbf{\hat{r}}$ was given as $\hat{i}\sin\theta\cos\phi + \hat{j}\sin\theta\cos\phi + \hat{k}\cos\theta$, repeating $\cos\phi$ for both the $\hat{i}$ and $\hat{j}$ components. The standard spherical-to-Cartesian unit vector is $\hat{i}\sin\theta\cos\phi + \hat{j}\sin\theta\sin\phi + \hat{k}\cos\theta$ (confirmed against the $\hat{\phi}$ and $\hat{\theta}$ unit vectors listed immediately below it in the same table, which are internally consistent with $\sin\phi$/$\cos\phi$ alternating correctly). Corrected the $\hat{j}$ component to $\sin\theta\sin\phi$.

Notes / not changed¶

• back/glossary.md contains two separate entries titled Euler-Lagrange equation (one with a formula, one with a one-line prose definition) and duplicate near-entries such as Constraints scleronomic / Scleronomic constraints and Constraints rheonomic / Rheonomic constraint. These are left as-is since removing either is a content/editorial judgment call beyond what this pass covers, not a mechanical error.