Computational Problems for Physics

Our future scientists and professionals must be conversant in computational techniques. In order to facilitate integration of computer methods into existing physics courses, this textbook offers a large number of worked examples and problems with fully guided solutions in Python as well as other languages (Mathematica, Java, C, Fortran, and Maple). It’s also intended as a self-study guide for learning how to use computer methods in physics. The authors include an introductory chapter on numerical tools and indication of computational and physics difficulty level for each problem. Readers also benefit from the following features:

• Detailed explanations and solutions in various coding languages.

• Problems are ranked based on computational and physics difficulty.

• Basics of numerical methods covered in an introductory chapter.

• Programming guidance via flowcharts and pseudocode.

Rubin Landau is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics at Oregon State University in Corvallis and a Fellow of the American Physical Society (Division of Computational Physics).

Manuel Jose Paez-Mejia is a Professor of Physics at Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia.

Rubin Landau is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics at Oregon State University in Corvallis and a Fellow of the American Physical Society (Division of Computational Physics). His research specialty is computational studies of the scattering of elementary particles from subatomic systems and momentum space quantum mechanics. Landau has taught courses throughout the undergraduate and graduate curricula, and, for over 20 years, in computational physics. He was the founder of the OSU Computational Physics degree program, an Executive Committee member of the APS Division of Computational Physics, and the AAPT Technology Committee. At present Landau is the Education co-editor for AIP/IEEE Computing in Science & Engineering and co-editor of this Taylor & Francis book series on computational physics. He has been a member of the XSEDE advisory committee and has been part of the Education Program at the SuperComputing (SC) conferences for over a decade.

Manuel Jose Paez-Mejia has been a Professor of Physics at Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia since January 1969. He has been teaching courses in Modern Physics, Nuclear Physics, Computational Physics, Numerical Methods, Mathematical Physics, and Programming in Fortran, Pascal, and C languages. He has authored scientific papers in nuclear physics and computational physics, as well as texts on the C Language, General Physics, and Computational Physics (coauthored with Rubin Landau and Cristian Bordeianu). In the past, he and Landau conducted pioneering computational investigations of the interactions of mesons and nucleons with few-body nuclei. Professor Paez has led workshop in Computational Physics throughout Latin America, and has been Director of Graduate Studies in Physics at the Universidad de Antioquia.