ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we present in a nutshell the fundamental aspects of engineering electromagnetics from the view of looking back in a reflective fashion at what has already been learned in undergraduate electromagnetics courses as a novice. The first question that
electromagnetics. If the question is posed to several individuals, it is certain that they will come up with sets of topics, not necessarily the same or in the same order, but all containing the topic of Maxwell’s equations at some point in the list, ranging from the beginning to the end of the list. In most cases, the response is bound to depend on the manner in which the individual was first exposed to the subject. Judging from the contents of the vast collection of undergraduate textbooks on electromagnetics, there is definitely a heavy tilt toward the traditional, or historical, approach of beginning with statics and culminating in Maxwell’s equations, with perhaps an introduction to waves. Primarily to provide a more rewarding understanding and appreciation of the subject matter, and secondarily owing to my own fascination resulting from my own experience as a student, a teacher, and an author [1-7] over a few decades, I have employed in this chapter the approach of beginning with Maxwell’s equations and treating the different categories of fields as solutions to Maxwell’s equations. In doing so, instead of presenting the topics in an unconnected manner, I have used the thread of statics-quasistatics-waves to cover the fundamentals and bring out the frequency behavior of physical structures at the same time.
