[OT] Who Knows of a Good Computational Physics Textbook?

[Dan Sommers]

Hi,

I posted this to sci.physics and alt.sci.physics and got nowhere;
perhaps the much more friendly and helpful crowd here can help me. I
know that a lot of pythonistas are, in fact, scientists.

I am a non-traditional, undergraduate physics (and math) student with
20+ years of professional software development behind me.

Does anyone have any recommendations for a good book from which my
professor and I can construct a one-semester independent study course on
computational physics?

Since this will be in the physics department at school, we are more
concerned with the direct applicability of the material to physics
rather than an extensive study of numerical methods from a strictly
mathematical or computer science point of view. Also, while I am not
afraid to learn yet another computer language, a steep learning curve in
that area would probably end up detracting from the physics aspects of
the course.

If you know of some place I can go in order to find the right questions
to ask (and possibly the right place to ask them!), then don't be afraid
to let me know that, too.

Thanks,
Dan

 

[beliavsky]

There is some info on teaching computational physics at Rubin Landau's
site http://www.physics.orst.edu/~rubin/ .

Springer recently published the book "Python Scripting for
Computational Science" by Hans P. Langtangen .

Searching "computational physics" at Amazon returns some relevant
books.

 

[Sean Richards]

This may be of interest

http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/329/lectures/lectures.html

Cheers, Sean

 

[beliavsky]

This may be of interest

http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/329/lectures/lectures.html

The information at
http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/329/lectures/node7.html about
scientific programming languages is out of date, since g95
http://www.g95.org is a free Fortran 95 compiler for all platforms (and
is already used in some courses), and Intel Fortran 95 for Linux is
free for non-commercial use.

 

[Scott David Daniels]

Look into Ruth Chabay's physics books for a possibly appropriate
choice and surpisingly on-topic choice. That is, unless you are
talking computational physics at the level of "ab initio
chemistry" and friends.

--Scott David Daniels
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Dan Sommers]

Thank you beliavsky, Sean, and Scott for the pointers.

Regards,
Dan

 

[James Stroud]

Look into "Game Physics" by Eberly (Elsevier).

There is some info on teaching computational physics at Rubin Landau's
site http://www.physics.orst.edu/~rubin/ .

Springer recently published the book "Python Scripting for
Computational Science" by Hans P. Langtangen .

Searching "computational physics" at Amazon returns some relevant
books.

--
James Stroud, Ph.D.
UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics
Box 951570
Los Angeles, CA 90095

http://www.jamesstroud.com/