PHYS 3437 - Computational Methods in Physics
Lecturer: Dr Rob Thacker, Office 301-C McNally Main, Office Hours 9am
to
10am Wednesday/Friday
My electronic-mail address is here: (click)
Telephone: 902-420-5636
Facsimile: 902-496-8218
Book: Numerical Recipes in Fortran, or Numerical Recipes in C. Note
that I have not found a book that covers all aspects of the course.
However, there are a lot of useful resources on the web, and I will
provide links while the course is being taught. Numerical Recipes
covers fundamental aspects of algorithms at a somewhat advanced level,
but it is incredibly useful and will prove to be a huge resource if
you go into computational physics at a higher level.
NEWS! -
Lectures 18 & 19 posted. A mock final can be downloaded here. The final will have exactly the same format,
but obviously different questions.
Course notes and news will appear here. Notes will be made available
following each lecture. Unfortunately since the course is a new preparation
I am unable to provide notes prior to the lecture.
I will update this page with new information once I start preparing the
lectures.
The course will focus on three broad aspects of computational physics: (a)
an extremely brief view computer architecture and how that impacts
algorithms (b) introduction to good programming and
methodologies, and numerical approaches to mathematics, such as solutions
of
differential equations and (c) more advanced topics, possibly including
simple parallel programming and visualization of data sets.
In this course you will be expected to learn a number of topics in your
own time, as was the case in previous years.
Location: MM-013, Tues-Thurs 10:00-11:15
Index of projects & primers
Index of lectures
Course outline/syllabus
Marking scheme
Assignments
Useful dates
Useful codes: makempeg shell script for making
movies,
Berkeley MPEG encoder.
