Physics 559, Special Topics = "Advanced Computational Physics"

This material can be found online at URL

http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys559/phys559.html

This page is a placeholder for the real page, which will be created before the course begins in the Winter Quarter, 2012.

The goals of the course are twofold:

1. to reinforce the importance of good programming practices
2. to introduce several numerical techniques which occur frequently in physics

The ten-week quarter will be split into three pieces of roughly equal length. Each piece will culminate in one project, designed to illustrate a specific numerical technique. The topics and their associated techniques will be:

N-body gravitational simulation

which will deal with methods to solve ordinary differential equations, and, in addition, mention some clever ways to deal with nasty facets of gravitational interaction

the transfer of heat

through one-, two-, and three-dimensional objects. We'll look at both time-independent and time-dependent solutions. The goal of this section is to figure out how to cook the perfect hamburger

independent project

is a chance for each student to pick a project of interest to herself. You may choose to use one of the techniques we have discussed in class, or learn a new one. This project takes the place of the final exam, and will be due during exam week.

The official programming environment will be MATLAB, since the computers in our classroom (Gosnell Lab, Mac side) will have it installed. Students who wish to use a different language may speak to the instructor to make their case.

This page maintained by Michael Richmond. Last modified Nov 25, 2012.