Course Outline
Course Title:
Physics 75.502T1 / 75.487* : Computational Physics
Professor:
Dean Karlen, Office: HP 3324, Phone extension: 4324
email: karlen@physics.carleton.ca
Course Overview:
I Introduction
An introduction
to the UNIX system in the computing facilities in the Carleton
University Physics Department is given.
(This information is only accessable from our site.)
Here are some programming hints.
II Numerical Methods
The following subjects are covered:
Linear Algebra,
Interpolation and Exptrapolation,
Integration,
Root Finding,
Minimization or Maximization,
Ordinary Differential Equations, and
Partial Differential Equations.
III Monte Carlo Techniques
We study methods to simulate processes that occur in nature
and methods to simulate experiments that measure these processes.
The following subjects are covered:
Introduction, Random Number Generators,
Special Distributions,
General Techniques, and
Multidimensional Simulation.
IV Statistics for Physicists
With simulated data, from part III, we learn how
to extract information from experiments, using a variety of statistical
methods.
The following subjects are covered:
Experimental Measurements and
Uncertainties,
Confidence Intervals,
Parameter Estimation: Likelihood Methods,
Least Squares Method,
Hypothesis Tests, and
Goodness of Fit Tests.
The particle data group (PDG)
has an excellent summary of statistics.
V Special Topics
Chaotic dynamics
and other topics will be presented as time permits.
The entire set of transparancies (264 pages with the index)
is available in
colour postscript or
in
black and white postscript.
These are gzipped files, about 1.6 MB.
The black and white version has two slides to the page.
Class Times:
Classes will be held twice each week during the Winter Term of 1997/98.
The class times will be determined to meet the students' schedules.
Text Books:
Required Textbook:
"Numerical Recipes in Fortran" or
"Numerical Recipes in C", Second Edition, W.H. Press, S.A. Teukolsky,
W.T. Vetterling, B.P. Flannery, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Recommended Textbook:
"Numerical Methods for Physics",
A.L. Garcia, Prentice Hall, 1994.
Grades:
The final grade will be based on weekly assignments, two in-class
exams, a
project
and an oral presentation of the project. Students
enrolled in 75.487 are not required to do the project. The weights
are as follows:
75.487
assignments (60%) ; exams (40%)
75.502
assignments (40%) ; exams (30%) ; project (20%) ;
presentation (10%)
Credits:
The slides for this course were generated with
LaTeX using the
seminar.sty style file.
Embedded figures were generated with xfig and graphs were created
using
PAW.
The figures for Monte Carlo Methods and Statistics were generated with
CorelDraw3 and
PAW.
The postscript files were converted to these Web pages using
Webify.
Java applications were developed using Symantec's
Visual Cafe.
