Numerical methods (teaching)
Numerical methods for physicists was a rather intense course in solving physical problems with a computer. I have not taught it in years now, and the links to the (french) sites below are kept for reference only. Nowadays our physics curriculum introduces to the use of computers in a gentler manner over several years, alleviating or at least diluting the difficulty of simultaneously
- getting comfortable with a programming/execution environment (typically Unix)
- learning a programming language
- learning about algorithms (how do I solve f(x)=0 in finite time (maybe even efficiently?) in my programming language?)
- learning about numerics (rounding errors, discretisation, computational complexity, …)
- solving physical problems through an algorithmic recipe
In case you are looking for some simple exercises in numerical physics, or just for some simple help on the C programming language, Linux tools and shell, or gcc, you can browse the following sites (in french!):
Here are also links to some hand-written notes (french again :-)) that I prepared for my introduction to numerics.
- Introduction to numerical method for physicists
- Solving f(x) = 0
- Number representations, error propagation
- (Systems of) linear equations
- Special tutorial break: pointers, variable scope and memory in C
- Ordinary differential equations
- Differentiating, integrating and data fitting
Last modified: 13 Oct 2015