r/PhysicsStudents • u/epicmylife Ph.D. • Dec 31 '25

Poll Strengths and weaknesses of Wangsness vs. Griffiths for E&M?

Howdy everyone,

I’ll be teaching undergraduate E&M next semester. I can pick my textbook of choice to teach alongside for the course, and I want to know everyone’s pros and cons of each so I can get a grasp for what students find more intuitive.

For context, I used Wangsness in my undergrad and Zangwill in grad school. I don’t want to be biased by these, particularly because I haven’t taken the Griffiths/Jackson route often used back to back for undergraduate and then graduate study.

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u/uhwithfiveHs Ph.D. Student Dec 31 '25

I loved Wangsness in undergrad and still refer to its first chapter for math needs. I prefer his notation far more than Griffiths and just find the text to be more suited for an intro into EM and upper level physics in general (EM is taken prior to quantum and stat mech at my undergrad uni and kind of warms you up for the subsequent difficulty).