Robert J. Kolenkow

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Robert J. Kolenkow is an American physicist and teacher. He is best known for being the coauthor, along with Daniel Kleppner, of a popular undergraduate physics textbook, An Introduction to Mechanics .

Kolenkow did his undergraduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating in 1955. For a time, he was an associate professor of physics at MIT. His departure in 1971 generated some controversy on campus; he was regarded as an excellent teacher by his students, however, the administration was viewed as being more concerned about research than education when making its tenure decisions.

Kolenkow became a professor at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. He also co-authored a textbook on physical geography which was favorably reviewed.

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Newton's laws of motion are three physical laws that describe the relationship between the motion of an object and the forces acting on it. These laws, which provide the basis for Newtonian mechanics, can be paraphrased as follows:

  1. A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, except insofar as it is acted upon by a force.
  2. At any instant of time, the net force on a body is equal to the body's acceleration multiplied by its mass or, equivalently, the rate at which the body's momentum is changing with time.
  3. If two bodies exert forces on each other, these forces have the same magnitude but opposite directions.
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An Introduction to Mechanics, commonly referred to as Kleppner and Kolenkow, is an undergraduate level textbook on classical mechanics coauthored by physicists Daniel Kleppner and Robert J. Kolenkow. It originated as the textbook for a one-semester mechanics course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where both Kleppner and Kolenkow taught, intended to go deeper than an ordinary first year course. Since its introduction, it has expanded its reach to other universities to become one of the most popular mechanics textbooks.