COS 323 - Computing for the Physical and Social Sciences

Fall 2007

Use C, C++, or Java for the first three assignments, and Matlab for the last two.

There is no formal textbook for the course, but the Numerical Recipes series of books contains a good deal of information, code, and references on many of the algorithms we'll be discussing. The book is available at most bookstores, or there's an online version of the C (and Fortran, but not C++) books.

Date	Main Topic    ...    Supplementary Material	Assignments
Tue, Sep 18	Course mechanics, introduction to modeling    more    IBM 704    Numerical computing*
Thu, Sep 20	Simulation, population genetics    more
Tue, Sep 25	Using random numbers    more    man random    auctions    binomial    Plotting options
Thu, Sep 27	Interpreting results, descriptive statistics    more    Review of C
Tue, Oct 2	Simulation    Madness    nasdaq    Competition    Bubbles in Pipeline    Wave Functions	Assignment 1 due
Thu, Oct 4	Integration    Simpson    Integration*    Robertson Hall Soliton?    Symbolic Computation
Tue, Oct 9	Root finding (1-d)    Root finding*    666    phase unwrapping
Thu, Oct 11	Optimization (1-d)    Optimization*
Tue, Oct 16	higher dimensions (con't)    animation (wikipedia)    example (umich)    IIR digital filter design	Assignment 2 due
Thu, Oct 18	Constrained optimization, linear programming    Examples (Vanderbei)    FIR filter design
con't	NP-completeness (sketch)    Local search:    min-cost networks
con't	nat. gas pipelines    flowshop problem    gatech/proctor & gamble
Tue, Oct 23	Basics of Ordinary Differential Equations    more    ODEs in Matlab and Maple    ditto
Thu, Oct 25	ODEs cont.: Accuracy and stability
Tue, Oct 30	No class - fall break
Thu, Nov 1	No class - fall break
Tue, Nov 6	ODEs cont.: Chaos    logistic map    Phillips curve    cellular automata    Sonification	Assignment 3 due
Thu, Nov 8	Introduction to Partial Differential Equations, numerical solution    nonlinear pendulum
Tue, Nov 13	PDEs cont., heat & wave eqns.    FPU 55    Dan Russell's demos    Maxwell    Euler    vN
Thu, Nov 15	PDEs cont., solution of wave eqns.    Soliton computing: up to 2001   up to 2007   wave
Tue, Nov 20	Sampling, aliasing, frequency analysis    Sampling and aliasing*	notes** Assign. 4
Thu, Nov 22	No class - Thanksgiving break
Tue, Nov 27	Sampling, aliasing, frequency analysis (con't)    FFT merge    FFT merge	Assignment 4 due
Thu, Nov 29	The FFT, windowing    star diffraction    cardinal spectrogram, NCMNS    Gauss
Tue, Dec 4	The 2-D FFT and linear image processing    Signal processing*
Thu, Dec 6	Solving linear systems*    more    Wilbur36    fig 1    2    3    4
Tue, Dec 11	Data modeling and least squares fitting*	Assignment 5 due
Thu, Dec 13	Linear systems: iterative and sparse methods*    student term paper proposals, in class	Project prop. due
Mon, Dec 17	(Virtual Thu)    Wildcard   Data visualization*	Project topic due
Tue, Jan 15	Dean's date	Project due

   * = slides from Szymon Rusinkiewicz    ** = slides from Connelly Barnes