About

PHY494 — Topic: Computational Methods in Physics

Computational Methods in Physics is an undergraduate class run in the Department of Physics at Arizona State University. The instructor is Oliver Beckstein.

The course provides an introduction to using the computer as a tool to solve problems in physics. Students will learn to analyze problems, select appropriate numerical algorithms, implement them using Python, a programming language widely used in scientific computing, and critically evaluate their numerical results. Problems will be drawn from diverse areas of physics.

Resources

Resources for the interactive classes are provided in the GitHub repository ASU-CompMethodsPhysics-PHY494/PHY494-resources.

For further details see the PHY494 Course Page.

For a number of lessons, videos are available.

Books

The two recommended books for the class are

1. Computational Modeling and Visualization of Physical Systems with Python, Jay Wang (2016) Wiley-VCH. ISBN: 978-1-119-17918-4
2. Computational Physics: Problem Solving with Python, 3rd Edition, Rubin H. Landau, Manuel J. Páez, Cristian C. Bordeianu. (2015) Wiley-VCH. ISBN: 978-3-527-41315-7

Additional books on online resources

1. Effective Computation in Physics. Field Guide to Research with Python, Anthony Scopatz and Kathryn D. Huff. (2015) O’Reilly
2. Software Carpentry (especially the lessons on the Unix Shell, Version Control with Git, and Programming with Python)

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Acknowledgements and Support

The class is supported by an Education Discount from the nice folks at GitHub Education and uses Classroom for GitHub.