Chapters 1 to 10 were devoted to statics, that is, to the analysis of bodies at rest. We now begin the study of dynamics, the part of mechanics that deals with the analysis of bodies in motion.

While the study of statics goes back to the time of the Greek philosophers, the first significant contribution to dynamics was made by Galileo (1564-1642). Galileo's experiments on uniformly accelerated bodies led Newton (1642-1727) to formulate his fundamental laws of motion.

1. Kinematics, which is the study of the geometry of motion. Kinematics is used to relate displacement, velocity, acceleration, and time, without reference to the cause of the motion.
2. Kinetics, which is the study of the relation existing between the forces acting on a body, the mass of the body, and the motion of the body. Kinetics is used to predict the motion caused by given forces or to determine the forces required to produce a given motion.

Chapters 11 to 14 are devoted to the dynamics of particles; in Chap. 11 the kinematics of particles will be considered. The use of the word particles does not mean that our study will be restricted to small corpuscles; rather, it indicates that in these first chapters the motion of bodies - possibly as large as cars, rockets, or airplanes - will be considered without regard to their size. By saying that the bodies are analyzed as particles, we mean that only their motion as an entire unit will be considered; any rotation about their own mass center will be neglected. There are cases, however, when such a rotation is not negligible; the bodies cannot then be considered as particles. Such motions will be analyzed in later chapters, dealing with the dynamics of rigid bodies.

In the first part of Chap. 11, the rectilinear motion of a particle will be analyzed; that is, the position, velocity, and acceleration of a particle will be determined at every instant as it moves along a straight line. First, general methods of analysis will be used to study the motion of a particle; then two important particular cases will be considered, namely, the uniform motion and the uniformly accelerated motion of a particle (Secs. 11.4 and 11.5). In Sec. 11.6 the simultaneous motion of several particles will be considered, and the concept of the relative motion of one particle with respect to another will be introduced. The first part of this chapter concludes with a study of graphical methods of analysis and their application to the solution of various problems involving the rectilinear motion of particles (Secs. 11.7 and 11.8).

In the second part of this chapter, the motion of a particle as it moves along a curved path will be analyzed. Since the position, velocity, and acceleration of a particle will be defined as vector quantities, the concept of the derivative of a vector function will be introduced in Sec. 11.10 and added to our mathematical tools. Applications in which the motion of a particle is defined by the rectangular components of its velocity and acceleration will then be considered; at this point, the motion of a projectile will be analyzed (Sec. 11.11). In Sec. 11.12, the motion of a particle relative to a reference frame in translation will be considered. Finally, the curvilinear motion of a particle will be analyzed in terms of components other than rectangular. The tangential and normal components of the velocity and acceleration of a particle will be introduced in Sec. 11.13 and the radial and transverse components of its velocity and acceleration in Sec. 11.14.