When I was in college at University of Florida, College of Electrical Engineering I spent time trying to understand Einsteins Theory of General Relativity, but got lost at the Taylor Series Expansions.
At the time I thought that Maxwells Equations and the derivations were obvious and I thought I could have derived them if Maxwell had not. Now I have forgotten much of that and know satellite dynamics these days.
Can’t follow you here! The Taylor series is an elementary and familiar tool. I can only suppose that you are referring to material covered by THE LINEARIZED THEORY OF GRAVITY in the MTW “phone book”. I wouldn’t think this would be a hurdle except that in a course on the subject, this would be the basis for a lot of calculation.
Well, I’ve got no business speaking up at all, since my understanding of the subject is largely illusory!
Cheers.
When I was a kid, and had endless quantities of paper and pencils, I used to amuse myself by playing with mathematics. I'm surprised by how much I figured out, some things which I only learned formally when I finally took calculus in college.
Having decided that mathematics is too boring, and chemistry and biology are more my style, I became a biochemist, and so the most complicated math I use is logarithmic functions. In the biology world, logarithms explain almost everything. And in the few cases where the biological function is better explained by a polynomial, the log function gives an approximate answer within three or four decimal points. Which is convenient, because logs are much easier to calculate than polynomials.