Adding Resistances and Capacitances in Introductory Electricity

Abstract

We propose a unified approach to addition of resistors and capacitors such that the formulae are always simply additive. This approach has the advantage of being consistent with the intuition of the students. To demonstrate our point of view, we re-work some well-known end-of-the-chapter textbook problems and propose some additional new problems.

13 pages, LaTeX, uses additional packages, 7 eps figures; one comment added after the truncated-cone resistor