Since I never managed to finish the dissertation after all, I decided to write an anti-dissertation: a collection of material I worked on back in my student years. As it happened, I was interested in calculating thermal and electromagnetic fields, both analytically and numerically.
I started writing the book in the summer of 2025 and dropped it in the autumn, because what I wanted was not working out (and, frankly, still has not), and I had no strength left for formatting.
But since writing is always the writer's psychotherapy, and Jean Claude Van Damme suddenly became my friend, taking the routine off my hands, I decided to close the gestalt after all. Jean is a good guy, but I did not give him too much freedom: I derived all the formulas myself, while he checked them and corrected my mistakes. I hope he did not fix all of them, otherwise I am afraid I might lose authorship.
Why an anti-dissertation? If we honestly hold this work against the formal requirements for a dissertation, the picture is as follows.
Scientific novelty and significance. There is neither. Everything presented here has been known for some seventy years: separation of variables, Fourier series, the Sturm–Liouville problem — textbook classics from long ago. The work offers no new methods, models, patterns or solutions; it does not extend existing knowledge and solves no scientific problem.
Practical significance. Also absent. For some thirty years there have been software packages that do everything described here — faster, more accurately and without the author’s involvement. There is no implementation, no software product of its own, no original method or technology, and so no economic, technical or social effect is to be expected.
Reliability of the results. Questionable. There are no reviews and no full-scale experiments — not a single bearing, not a single blast furnace has been touched by hand. No one has independently verified the conclusions, so they can be taken on trust at best.
The author’s personal contribution. Highly doubtful. A significant part was done not by the author but by Jean, so calling the work entirely independent would be a stretch.
Validation of the results. None whatsoever. The results have not been presented anywhere and have undergone no professional discussion. Not a single real mechanism has ever been computed using this guide — there is essentially nothing to test in practice.
Publications. None, of course. Not a single paper on the topic, let alone in a peer-reviewed journal. And it is hard to imagine a publisher willing to print such a thing.
Coherence and logic of the research. Not in evidence: there is no statement of a real problem. The classic plot — “the bearings used to overheat and fail, then the author did the maths and they stopped overheating” — is nowhere to be found here. And since there is essentially nothing and no reason to compute, no coherent chain of “problem → method → result → conclusion” emerges.
Scale of the problem solved. Modest. Everything covered here is enough, at best, for an introductory course in differential equations.
If you have read this far and you are not disappointed, then go ahead: help yourself — or, better still, feed it to a model.
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