260306 VO Computational Physics II (2008S)

This regular course extends over the entire academic year and consists of a weekly 4 (3) hours of lectures and 2 hours of workshop. It is designed for students from the third year up. The textbook "Computational Physics - An Introduction" by Franz Vesely (Plenum 1994 and Kluwer 2001) is based on this course. The first three chapters are devoted to a thorough, if concise, treatment of the main ingredients from numerical mathematics: finite differences, linear algebra, and stochastics. This exercise will prove valuable when we proceed, in chapters 4 and 5, to combine these elementary tools into powerful instruments for the integration of differential equations. The final chapters - to be treated in the following summer term - are devoted to a number of applications in selected fields. The course material is deposited at my website, http://homepage.univie.ac.at/franz.vesely/ . In an ongoing project I am gradually augmenting the web material by sample programs. These are written in JAVA and are accompanied by short explanations. In addition, various ad hoc questions are answered in the NOTES on my homepage. Table of contents, Winter Term: 1. Finite Difference Calculus/2. Linear Algebra/3. Stochastics/4. Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE)/5. Partial Differential Equations(PDE). TOC, Summer Term: Statistical Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Hydrodynamics.