551 COMPUTATIONAL PHYSICS

Spring semester 2009. Meet on Thursday from 3:00-4.00 pm at 221 HELP ROOM.

Lecturer: Alex Travesset

A-503 Physics, Office phone 2947191, e-mail trvsst@ameslab.gov

Course web page: http://course.physastro.iastate.edu/phys551/

Office hours: Tuesday 2:00-2.50 PM, Wednesday 2.00-2:50 PM in A-503 Physics. Other times are possible, but please make an appointment by e-mail.

Grading: This is a S/F course. There are no exams but you must complete ALL assignments to get a S grade.

There is no textbook, but the following references will be helpful:

· M. Lutz and D. Ascher, Learning Python, O’Reilly Publications, Sebastopol, CA, USA 2004.

· C. Hughes and T. Hugues, Multicore Programming, Wiley Publishing, Indianapolis, IN 2007.

· W.H. Press, B.P. Flannery, S.A. Teukolsky, W.T. Vetterling, Numerical recipes, the art of scientific computing, Oxford University Press, there are many versions.

· N. Giordano, Computational Physics, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River NJ, USA 1997.

· Tao Pang, An introduction to Computational Physics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK 2006.

· D.P. Landau and K. Binder, A Guide to Monte-Carlo Simulations in Statistical Physics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK 2009.

· D. Frenkel and B. Smit, Understanding Molecular Simulation, from Algorithms to Applications, Academic Press, 2001.