Physics 3730/6720


PHYS 3730/6720	Introduction to Computers in Physics		FALL 2006

Lecture plan

Please note: The following lecture plan is TENTATIVE. It may be revised during the course of the semester.

Week 0.

Wed 23-Aug-2006. Course overview, physics workstations, rudiments of unix, the GNU Emacs text editor, and maybe a word on vi.

Week 1.

Mon 28-Aug-2006. Unix in more detail: file structure, operations on files, and some utility programs.
Wed 30-Aug-2006. Plotting, previewing and printing; postscript, and some topics which do not begin with "p".

Week 2.

Mon 04-Sep-2006. (Labor Day.)
Wed 06-Sep-2006. Shell scripts and scripting languages (sed, awk, perl).

Week 3.

Mon 11-Sep-2006. Document Preparation: TeX and LaTeX, html.
Wed 13-Sep-2006. Numerical data representation on digital machines.

Week 4.

Mon 18-Sep-2006. An introduction to C++.
Wed 20-Sep-2006. C++ basics, working with pointers.

Week 5.

Mon 25-Sep-2006. C++ preprocessing and compiling, plus a little on C++ classes.
Wed 27-Sep-2006. Compiling, linking, loading and archiving; organizing the process with makefiles.

Week 6.

Mon 02-Oct-2006. Introduction to other programming languages.
Wed 04-Oct-2006. More on C++ classes

Mon 09-Oct-2006. Basic statistics and random number generators.
Wed 11-Oct-2006. Numerical intergration and Monte Carlo methods.

Mon 16-Oct-2006. Numerical integration.
Wed 18-Oct-2006. MIDTERM EXAM

Mon 23-Oct-2006. Introduction to fitting, gnuplot, chi-squares.
Wed 25-Oct-2006. Fitting linear functions, using Numerical Recipes library.

Mon 30-Oct-2006. Fitting nonlinear functions. Maximum likelihood technique.
Wed 01-Nov-2006. Introduction to Maple.

Mon 06-Nov-2006. More Maple, focus on graphics.
Wed 08-Nov-2006. Linear algebra with Maple.

Mon 13-Nov-2006. ODE's with Maple, Euler's method.
Wed 15-Nov-2006. ODE's II: Runge-Kutta.

Mon 20-Nov-2006. ODE's III: Coupled 1st-order equations.
Wed 22-Nov-2006. Portable Pixel Map (.ppm) image files.

Mon 27-Nov-2006. Making animated .gif's.
Wed 29-Nov-2006. Fourier transforms

Mon 04-Dec-2006. Applications of Fourier transforms
Wed 06-Dec-2006. Course Review

Final Exam Week

Fri 15-Dec-2006. FINAL EXAM, 1:00-3:00 PM

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Last updated: Wed Dec 6 14:26:34 MST 2006