PHY201 - Physics Computations II (Fall 2006)

Maintained by Phil Duxbury
All course materials and worksheets will appear here

Instructor

  • Prof. Phil Duxbury - BPS4260, duxbury@pa.msu.edu

    Course Outline

    This one credit course is the second of three such courses (PHY102, PHY201, PHY301) designed to introduce undergraduate students to computer programming tools useful in solving physics problems. PHY102 emphasizes the use of Mathematica, PHY201 concentrates on Fortran 90, and PHY301 focuses on C++/C. Mathematica will continue to be used from time to time.

    Course Assessment

  • 75% will come from your solution to the weekly worksheets. For each worksheet which is not completed your grade is reduced by 0.5. If you complete all the worksheets but do not do the lab. exam, you get a 3.0 grade.
  • 25% will come from a one hour practical (lab) exam at the end of the semester. This exam will be held in the last week of semester during your regular lab. time. In the exam you will be asked to write simple Fortran code and to use Mathematica. Nothing new will be introduced. You will need to know how to use the online help facilities.

    Classes are in BPS1240

    Lab. Time 1-3 Thursday

    The worksheets

    Worksheet 1 - due 8th Sept. at 5pm.
    Worksheet 2 - due 15th Sept. at 5pm.
    Worksheet 3 - due 29th Sept. at 5pm.
    Worksheet 4 - due 20th Oct. at 5pm.
    Worksheet 5 - due Dec. 1 at 5pm.

    Reference materials

  • Online notes Here is a summary of Fortran 90 which we shall refer to during the course. It comes from the www site

  • Here is a list of useful unix commands and an introduction to Linux Computing in BPS1240.

  • Useful books "An introduction to Fortran 90 for scientific computing", by James M. Ortega.
    A more advanced book is
    "Fortran 90/95 explained" second edition. by Michael Metcalf and John Reid. Oxford University Press, 1999.

  • A nice online book containing Fortran 77, Fortran 90 and C++ codes for a wide range of useful procedures is Numerical recipes online . You will need to read some sections of this book during the course.