COS 323 - COMPUTING FOR THE PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

Schedule: Tues, Thur 1:30-2:50, Room 103 CS building;
choose one of two precept slots: MECA lab, E-423 E-QUAD,
Tues 3:00-3:50, Wed 4:00-4:50.

Instructor: Ken Steiglitz, Room 421 CS Building, email ken@cs.princeton.edu,
phone 258-4629, office hours by appointment, send email.

Graduate Teaching Assistant Georg Essl: gessl@cs.princeton.edu

Undergraduate Assistants: TBA

Course mailing list: cs323@cs.princeton.edu

Acknowledgements:
The following students participated in the development of this course, and especially the assignments (in which authors are indicated) 1997: Mike Carreno, Niki Kittur, J. Sheehan Maduraperuma; 1998: Roger Ahn, Liadan O'Callaghan, Hide Oki.
Thanks to Dannie Durand for help in developing the material on population genetics, and David Dobkin for contributing to the lectures on root-finding and optimization. I'm also grateful to the President's 250th Anniversary Fund, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the Computer Science Department for generous development support.

Catalog Description:
COS 323 Computing for the Physical and Social Sciences
Principles of scientific computation, driven by current applications in biology, physics, economics, engineering, etc. Topics include: simulation, integration of differential equations, iterative optimization algorithms, stability and accuracy issues. Students will pursue projects in a variety of fields, writing their own computer programs and also using higher-level tools such as Maple.
QR Fall Two lectures, one class. Prerequisites: COS 126 and MAT 104. K. Steiglitz

Grading: Weekly 5-minute quizzes, regular programming assignments, midterm project proposal, final project report, class participation

Text: No text is assigned. Lecture Notes will be distributed through Pequod, and readings assigned when appropriate. A good general reference is online: [PTVF92] Numerical Recipes. Feel free to use it as a reference, but write your own short programs.