
Intro to Computational Physics - agumonkey
http://mas.lvc.edu/walck/phy261/syl261.html
======
saboot
All it teaches is Euler's method (and the euler-cromer variation)? That's ..
not much and pretty basic. I'd expect a lot more from a comp. physics course.
Usually you see at least something like symplectic integration, solving PDEs,
quadratures, and a monte-carlo simulation like a 2D Ising model. I've taken
two comp. physics courses at the undergrad and grad level. definitely
preferred the course where he explained the algorithm in pseudo-code on the
board, and we could write it however we pleased.

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pc86
I can't speak as to why this specifically was posted, but the school is in my
general area (less than an hour away) and is not particularly well regarded on
the academic front. I'm not familiar with Dr. Walck so I don't mean that as a
judgment on him at all, just referring to the school generally. If your focus
is athletics it's probably okay despite being D3.

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darmok
According to Wikipedia:

\------------- Consistently named to US News & World Report's "America’s Best
Colleges" list under the Regional College (North) and Best Value School
categories. The Princeton Review also recognized the college as "A Best in the
Northeast," and Lebanon Valley College was also named on Forbes' list of
"America's Top Colleges." \-------------

I'm not familiar with LVC, but it seems like it's regarded as a pretty decent
place to go to school.

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gjm11
Similar in spirit (but not so introductory and specific to mechanics):
_Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics_ , by Sussman and Wisdom.
Whole book available online here:
[https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/...](https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/sicm/book.html)
.

(SICM uses Scheme -- of course! -- where this course uses Haskell. SICM is
cited in the paper linked by _agumonkey_ as an influence on the approach taken
in this course.)

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saboot
SICM also goes into way more physics than this course page does. Lagrangian /
Hamiltonian mechanics, canonical transformations leading to symplectic
integration, phase spaces, and perturbation theory.

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kutkloon7
I find the combination of Haskell and such simple techniques quite odd. This
seems more like an introduction to Haskell using some toy physics
computational examples.

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agumonkey

      - paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.4880
      - source: https://twitter.com/prezcannady/status/807065697608224768

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gravypod
I wish courses like this where available for CS majors instead of math and
physics courses. I might actually learn something.

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dhruvmittal
I immediately love that this is taught in Haskell. I hadn't learned how
excellent Haskell is for (non-hpc) computational physics until well into my
Masters, where I began to replace my python analysis scripts.

And it's a far sight more elegant than my first Numerical Methods class, which
used MatLab.

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martincmartin
Related topic: What software do theoretical physics use when developing
theories? Mathematica? Or do they just use paper and pencil?

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sonium
Developing theories: pen & paper Testing theories: anything from Mathematica,
Python and if things get serious: Fortan

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WesternStar
Looks cool. Any way you can share the notes?

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agumonkey
I'm just pushing what the tweet above said. Maybe notes/lectures will be
uploaded later .. I don't know.

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novalis78
thanks for sharing this, looks really cool

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agumonkey
In case you don't know, there's a book called SICM Structure and
Interpretation of Classical Mechanics (by Sussman, SICP author). Similar idea,
physics + computing, except it's a scheme library. Google it.

