Computational Physics at Grinnell College

The computational physics course developed at Grinnell (with assistance from the NSF through grant DUE-9552092) was an effort to move the cooperative learning pedagogy used in Grinnell's Discovery-Based Physics course to an intermediate level course. This course involves fourteen different guided exercises over the semester covering mostly common topics in computational physics. Clicking on each title will allow you to download the complete activity guide in PDF format. You may feel free to use them as you see fit for no charge, although copyright is retained by Mark Schneider. These activity guides have been used several times at Grinnell, but have not been classroom tested elsewhere, so neither the author nor Grinnell College can guarantee suitability for your particular application. For additional information, contact Mark Schneider at schneidm@grinnell.edu.

• Errors and Intro to Monte Carlo
• Looking at Functions and Data
• Interpolation
• Root Finding and Minimization
• Numerical and Symbolic Integration
• Matrices and Eigenvalues
• Numerical Solutions of Differential Equations I
• Numerical Solutions of Differential Equations II
• Data Fitting--Least Squares and All That
• Fourier Transforms
• Text, Graphics, and Equations
• A Bit of Chaos
• Monte Carlo Simulations
• An Introduction to the Internet and the World Wide Web
  

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This page is maintained by Mark Schneider (schneidm@grinnell.edu). Send questions or corrections directly to him. This page was last updated on Sept. 30, 2004.