Computational Physics

Description

Nicholas Giordano obtained his B.S. at Purdue University and his Ph.D. at Yale University. He has been on the faculty at Purdue since 1979, served as an Assistant Dean of Science from 2000-2003, and is currently the Hubert James Distinguished Professor of Physics. His research interests include electrical conduction, superconductivity, and magnetism in ultra-small metallic structures, along with musical acoustics and the physics of the piano. Ideas for this book grew out of the course on computational physics that he developed and taught in the early 1990s. Professor Giordano earned a Computational Science Education Award from the Department of Energy in 1997, and in 2004 was named Indiana Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education.

Hisao Nakanishi earned his B.S. from Brown University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. His Ph.D. research concerned scaling and universality in a geometric phase transition called percolation and he has been interested in scale-invariance ever since. During his first postdoctoral work at Cornell he was introduced to the problem of surface critical phenomena such as wetting phase transitions, and later at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he started working on the statistics of diffusion and polymers in earnest. .In 1992 Professor Nakanishi was a part of the team that won a Gordon Bell Prize for the application of parallel computing to a problem in polymer statistics. More recently he has also put on another hat as a developer of a computer-based interactive exercise system which is used by a few thousand students at Purdue each year.

• Contains a wealth of topics to allow instructors flexibility in the choice of topics and depth of coverage:
• Examines projective motion with and without realistic air resistance.
• Discusses planetary motion and the three-body problem.
• Explores chaotic motion of the pendulum and waves on a string.
• Includes topics relating to fractal growth and stochastic systems.
• Offers examples on statistical physics and quantum mechanics.

• Contains ample explanations of the necessary algorithms students need to help them write original programs, and provides many example programs and calculations for reference.