Physics 410: Computational Physics (Fall 2019) |
| COURSE HOME PAGE (this page): http://laplace.phas.ubc.ca/410/ |
| Instructor: Matthew (Matt) W. Choptuik | Office Hours: Tue 13:00-14:00 and by appointment
via e-mail |
| Office: Hennings 403 | Web page: http://laplace.physics.ubc.ca/People/matt/ |
| Office Phone: 604-822-2412 | |
| E-mail: choptuik@phas.ubc.ca
|
TAs: Michael Kinach (mikin@phas.ubc.ca) Daniel Korchinski (djkorchi@phas.ubc.ca) |
SCHEDULE:
|
| COURSE LINKS |
| This
course will provide a survey of techniques from numerical
analysis and other areas of computational science with
applications to problems in physics. A provisional list of topics is as follows (in roughly the order we will be covering them):
Application areas will include: classical dynamics,
quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, electromagnetism
and fluid dynamics. |
| There is no required or optional text book for
the course, but see HERE for
a list of references, many of which provide coverage for
much of what we will be discussing. Note that
full-text PDF versions of most of these references are
available from the UBC library. The PDFs for Powerpoint or equivalent notes will be posted HERE. However, it is up to you to take notes when I present them on the blackboard or document camera. |
| The "official" computer language for this course
is MATLAB. MATLAB provides a powerful and convenient programming environment that is tailor-made for numerical calculations of the sort we will be considering. It is an interpreted language, which makes it well suited for the type of rapid prototyping and interactive experimentation that you will be encouraged to do in the tutorials and homework assignments. MATLAB is available for you to install on your own computers. See HERE for details. You are strongly encouraged to use MATLAB for this course but if you absolutely must, you can also use Python. Work in any other language (including C/C++) will not be accepted. You should also bear in mind that my own Python skills are extremely limited. |
Your work in this course will consist of several
homework assignments, 2 or 3 projects (which can be viewed
as advanced homeworks) and a final exam. These will have the
following weighting
Late work will not be accepted unless there are extremely extenuating circumstances. If you find yourself in the position of needing an extension you must request one from me via an e-mail message as soon as possible and definitely before the due date of the assignment/project. Each homework/project submission must contain, as a PDF file, a writeup detailing how you completed the assignment, and what the results and conclusions were. This PDF file must be accompanied by the source code files that were used to complete the work. When preparing and submitting a homework/project, you must:
Please use the following naming conventions for your zipped folders (use all lower case) <lastname>-<student number>-homework-<n>.zip <lastname>-<student number>-project-<n>.zip where <n> is the number of the homework or project. For example choptuik-31415926-homework-2.zip is an appropriately named .zip'ed folder (do not include the "meta" symbols < and > in the filename). Note that when creating the zip'ed folder you do not need to specify the .zip extension---that will be done automatically. You are welcome to discuss your homework assignments and projects with your fellow students. However, the work that you submit must be your own. |
|
| See the UBC 2019/2020 Calendar and Academic Year [all year] pages for more information |