Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri - Classical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism: A Course of Lectures (Texts and Readings in Physical Sciences, 21)

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Debashis Ghoshal, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

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Kedar Damle, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India

Ashok Das, University of Rochester, New York, USA

Gautam Menon, Ashoka University, Sonepat, India

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A. K. Raychaudhuri (19232005) (in short, AKR) was well known for his research in general relativity and cosmology. D.Sc. from Calcutta University as well as D.Sc. (Honoris Causa) Burdwan University, he was Professor at his alma mater, Presidency College, Calcutta, from 1961 to 1986. Subsequent to his retirement from Presidency College, he was Senior Scientist, INSA and Honorary Visiting Professor, Jadavpur University. His most important contribution was the deduction of the eponymous Raychaudhuri equations in 1955; this provided the basis for subsequent fundamental work on gravitational singularities by Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking that led to the award in 2020 of the Nobel Prize in Physics to Sir Roger Penrose.

The first edition of AKRs Classical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism, published by Oxford University Press in 1990, was instantly recognized as a masterful pedagogical exposition of the subject. AKR taught generations of physics graduates who passed through the portals of Presidency College, and many of the leading physicists of India have benefited from his instruction, in taste and style, and especially in substance.

This revised edition is occasioned firstly by a desire to see the book made available to new generations of students of physics. AKRs treatment of the subject has its own whimsy and is valuable in its own right. In addition, there were some errors in the first edition that he (and others) had noted, and it was important that these be corrected. Fortunately, we had his personal copy on which he had made hand-written notes, and the changes that he wanted have now been made here. We have (very occasionally) changed some more archaic phrases that he had used, and have also taken this opportunity to redraw and amend some of the figures.

The most significant change, however, has been in the modernization of the units and the notation. In the past few decades, SI units are standard in instruction, and although the Gaussian units are more natural in some contexts, we felt that in order to address contemporary students, it was necessary to change the units in most of the chapters (exceptions have been indicated clearly). This required both care and diligence, and we would like to thank our colleagues, especially Prof. Anindya Datta (University of Calcutta) for his thorough reading of the entire text. Our thanks are also due to Profs. S. Uma Sankar and B. Nandi of IIT Bombay for going through some of the chapters, and to Prof. Debashis Ghoshal of the JNU for his careful editing of the final manuscript and for redrafting some of the figures.

It is our pleasure to thank Oxford University Press for their generosity with regard to the copyright, and the Hindustan Book Agency for bringing out the TRiPS series, this volume in particular. Our special thanks go out to Prof. Ram Ramaswamy for his initiative and his enthusiastic participation in seeing the revival of this textbook, which serves to remind us once more of the great scientific and pedagogic contributions of AKR.