Physics 81 — Midterm 1 Review
Electrostatics, Vector Calculus, and Conductors (Lecture Notes Ch 1–3 + Purcell Ch 1–3)
A concept-by-concept review of the midterm 1 material. Each concept lives on its own page with intuition, key formulas, a worked example or two, and a handful of practice problems with collapsible solutions. The sidebar is the full table of contents — use it to jump around.
Chapter 1 — Electrostatics
Coulomb's law, electric fields, flux, Gauss's law, potential, and energy. The core toolkit for computing fields and potentials of charge distributions.
- Coulomb's Law & Superposition
- The Electric Field
- Field of a Dipole
- Fields of Continuous Distributions
- Electric Flux
- Gauss's Law (Integral Form)
- Field of a Spherical Charge
- Field of an Infinite Plane
- Field of an Infinite Line
- Electric Potential
- Potential of Continuous Distributions
- Energy of Charge Configurations
- Energy Density of the E Field
Chapter 2 — Vector Calculus for E&M
Gradient, divergence, curl, and the Laplacian. The differential form of Gauss's law, Stokes' theorem, and why $\nabla\times\vec{E}=0$ in electrostatics.
- The Gradient
- Equipotentials
- Divergence
- Divergence Theorem
- Gauss's Law (Differential Form)
- Curl
- Stokes' Theorem & Curl of E
- Laplacian, Poisson & Laplace's Equation
Chapter 3 — Conductors
What conductors do in electric fields: field inside is zero, surface charges rearrange, and the uniqueness theorem lets you guess solutions (method of images). Capacitors and energy storage.