Computational Physics: Steven E. Koonin
Benjamin-Cummings Publishing Company | ISBN: 0805354301 | 1985-10 | djvu (ocr) | 426 pages | 9.4 Mb
Computation is an integral part of modern science and the ability to exploit effectively the power offered by computers is therefore essential to a working physicist. The proper application of a computer to modeling physical systems is far more than blind "number crunching", and t..he successful computational physicist draws on a balanced mix of analytically soluble examples, physical intuition, and numerical work to solve problems which are otherwise intractable.
Unfortunately, the ability "to compute" is seldom cultivated by the standard university-level physics curriculum, as it requires an integration of three disciplines (physics, numerical analysis, and computer pr:ogramming) covered in disjoint courses. Few physics students finish their undergraduate education knowing how to compute; those that do usually learn a limited set of techniques in the course of independent work, such as a research project or a senior thesis.
The material in this book is aimed at refining computational skills in advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate students by providing direct experience in using a computer to model physical systems. Its scope includes the minimum set of numerical techniques needed to "do physics" on a computer. Each of these is developed in the text, often heuristically, and is then applied to solve non-trivial problems in classical, quantum, and statistical physics. These latter have been chosen to enrich or extend the standard undergraduate phYSICS curriculum, and so have considerable intrinsic interest, quite independent of the computational principles they illustrate.
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