Practice problems in Chapter 2:

  • 2.45: Will help you practice calculating script r
  • 2.49: practice calculating energy
  • Problem 2.54 is so cool, and if we had another week of the semester I’d make sure we did it, because it helps you appreciate how electrostatics is formulated, but I don’t think I would do that one to practice for the exam given that it asks you to consider a completely different set of physical laws.
  • 2.60: practice calculating work

Practice problems in Chapter 3:

  • 3.35: Practice using the multipole approximation to find the approximate field (Remember what I said in class Friday: if the total charge is zero then the dipole term probably dominates)
  • 3.42: This is really interesting given our discussion about problem 3.16. Can’t you use the reverse of this argument to say that the field at center of the box in 3.16 has to be V_0/6??
  • 3.43: A nice boundary value problem with the answer given. This is too long for me to put on the exam, but it’ll be good practice.
  • 3.53: Practice with images.

Practice problems in Chapter 4:

  • 4.37: Again, too complicated for the exam, but brings together a lot of what we’ve talked about. On the exam I could ask you to set it up and tell me the boundary conditions and your plan for solving the problem.
  • 4.39: This is so cool, but way too un-straight-forward for the exam. It makes you confront the uniqueness theorem, which you definitely should confront for the exam.
  • 4.35: You should be able to tell me RIGHT AWAY what the field is outside the dielectric sphere.

Things I’m missing:

  • Applying Gauss’ Law (make sure you can find the field using Gauss’ law)
  • Taking gradients, and divergences (make sure you can take gradients and divergences)