Description
Book SynopsisPresenting mathematical techniques for physical problems which cannot be solved using traditional mathematical methods, this textbook is invaluable for undergraduate students in physics. It features over 250 end-of-chapter exercises and a website hosted by the author gives a complete set of programs used to generate the examples and figures.
Trade Review'Computational Methods for Physics by Joel Franklin is a numerical analysis text written from the point of a physicist and pitched at upper-level physics students. It is different from what you might see in a text written by an applied mathematician. The core [chapters] of the text … each … [discuss] a numerical method … and … [have] a section on the physical motivation for needing the technique. In addition there are chapters on chaos and neural networks. Each chapter contains a good list of problems, both mathematical and computational. … This text is an excellent introduction to using numerical methods …' Jan Tobochnik, American Journal of Physics
'Joel Franklin's approach in this text is very much that of the physicist, in that he takes great pains to demonstrate the range of physical problems to which each computational technique might be applied before introducing the numerical method itself. … This book takes an original approach to teaching numerical methods to undergraduate physicists, and broadly succeeds in its task. There is a good range of material, and it is clearly presented at an appropriate level. It has great potential as a course text.' A. H. Harker, Contemporary Physics
Table of Contents1. Programming overview; 2. Ordinary differential equations; 3. Root-finding; 4. Partial differential equations; 5. Time dependent problems; 6. Integration; 7. Fourier transform; 8. Harmonic oscillators; 9. Matrix inversion; 10. The eigenvalue problem; 11. Iterative methods; 12. Minimization; 13. Chaos; 14. Neural networks; 15. Galerkin methods; References; Index.
