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This is derived in a similar fashion to Gauss' theorem, except now, instead of considering a volume and taking a surface integral, we consider a surface andtake a line integral around the edge of the surface. In this case the surface does not enclose a volume. A good picture that describes what is being doneis figure 2.23 in Berkeley Physics Course Volume 2. (Unfortunately it is copyrighted, and so it can not be shown on the web - If somebody reading thiscan provide some suitable drawings I would incorporate them with an acknowledgment). The following figures are not as good as in the book, butwill have to do for now. We have some surface with a vector field passing throughit: We can take the line integral around the edge of the surface and evaluate that.We can also slice the surface into two parts The line integral along the common edge will have opposite signs for each half andso the sum of the two individual line integrals will equal the line integral of the complete surface. We can subdivide as much as we want and we willalways have: Since we can subdivide as much as we want we can break the surface down into acollection of tiny squares, each of which lies in the , or planes.
Consider asquare in the x y plane and lets find the line integral Let us find the line integral of . First consider the x component at the center of the bottom of the square and then at the center of the top So multiplying by and subtracting the top and bottom to get the contribution to the line integral gives Minus sign comes about from the integration direction (if at the top is more positive this results in a negative contribution)Similarly in we get the contribution because is more positive in the right you get a positive contribution
So for this simple example which is just or if we define such that it has the area and a direction perpendicular to the plane it is We have shown the above is true for a square in the plane. Similarly we would look at the other possible planes and in plane would get which is . In the plane we get which is
So in the 3d case we see that Now becomes which in the infinitesimal limit is This is the fundamental definition of curl. We have shown that the del operator "crossed" into the vector field captures the definition of theoperation.
As a side note, Physicists uniformly refer to the above as Stoke's theorem but in fact that is a more general theorem and the above can correctly be calledthe "curl theorem". This is a physics course though, so we will call it Stoke's theorem.
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