Book Description

The use of computers to solve modern scientific problems is very widespread. The impact of the improvement of our techniques for the solution of complex problems is difficult to overstate. Even our approach to most problems has been changed. Solutions to problems once thought intractable are being routinely secured. Instead of using oversimplified models, as has been the practice for the treatment of scientific systems in the past, the entire problem can now be attacked. The second edition of Computation in Modern Physics develops and presents algorithms for the solution of many types of mathematical systems, some dating as far as the last few centuries, but also quite a number that have been developed within the last 10-50 years. In this last category, close attention is paid to the rapidly developing area of Monte Carlo techniques where new conceptual views of physics problems are being brought into play. With this method, problems in a large number of dimensions can be solved through the introduction of a modern method for the representation of multidimensional functions. This book is suitable for two different levels in computational physics. The first part is an advanced introductory level and is appropriate for good students with no previous experience in computational methods or any student with some experience. Here the student is introduced to integral and differential techniques, Monte Carlo integration, basic computer architecture, methods of linear algebra, finite element techniques, digital signal processing and chaos. The second part of the book is more specialized for problems in strong interaction with emphasis on solutions to many-body scattering problems andseveral-body bound state calculations with Monte Carlo techniques. It also contains a chapter dealing with techniques for the summation of divergent series.