A First Course in Computational Physics

DeVries (Miami U.) and Hasbun (U. of West Georgia) introduce students to the third way of doing physics--in addition besides experimental and theoretical--that has become possible with the advent of cheap computers and is now accepted as legitimate. They assume students have completed a year of basic physics, and are already familiar enough with the MATLAB programming environment to apply it to scientific computing. The topics covered are functions and roots, interpolation and approximation, numerical integration, ordinary differential equations, Fourier analysis, and partial differential equations. The accompanying disk contains additional code from the text. The first edition was published in 1994. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)