PHYS3820 Computational Physics#

Lecture notes for PHYS3820 Computational Physics at Valdosta State University. This course is designed using Computational Physics With Python by Eric Ayars (2013) and Computational Physics: Problem Solving with Computers by Landau, Paez, & Bordeianu (2007), where it will include summaries of the course material and code implementation/exercises.

Course Description: The course will serve as an introduction to scientific writing and computing, which includes basic computational skills (e.g., Python, GitHub, and LaTeX); Data fitting and interpolation; numerical integration and differentiation; and numerically solving ordinary differential equations (ODEs). To this end, students will complete 3 projects, where the results in each of the first two projects will be presented as a “paper” in the style of Physical Review Letters (2000 words). The topics of these projects are:

  1. Crater counts on the Moon (data fitting), and

  2. Projectile motion with atmospheric drag.

The final project will be assigned by the instructor at midterm on one of the following topics:

  • Ising Model

  • Pandemic SIR modeling

  • Quantum particle in a box

  • Logistic map

  • Damped driven oscillator

  • Brachistochrone

  • Chaotic scattering

will consist of a longer (3000 words) paper detailing the project, and a 15 minute oral (slide) presentation explaining the project to our peers.