Weekly plans and update for week 36
Hello everybody. We hope this week started the best possible way.
Here follows a brief summary of last week with plans for this week:
Lectures: last week we discussed in detail project 1, with an emphasis on the numerics and mathematics of gaussian elimination for a tridiagonal matrix, both a general one and so-called tridiagonal Toeplitz matrix that results from the discretization of the second derivative. The details are discussed in for example chapter 6 of the lectures and the slides at http://compphysics.github.io/ComputationalPhysics/doc/pub/linalg/html/linalg.html
Last Friday we discussed also several C++ programming aspects (feel free to use the codes that are linked to the slides)
and ended with how to allocate matrices dynamically. This material can be found under the Teach your several C++ material at http://compphysics.github.io/ComputationalPhysics/doc/pub/learningcpp/html/learningcpp-bs.html
I recommend looking at those slides. Also, if you feel intimidated of learning a new language, feel free to write using a programming language you are familiar with (python, c, fortran etc).
This week we continue with linear algebra and finalize our discussion of gaussian elimination and LU decomposition. We will also discuss other methods for solving linear equations like iterative methods. All the material can be found in chapter 6 of the lecture notes as well as in the slides at
http://compphysics.github.io/ComputationalPhysics/doc/pub/linalg/html/linalg.html
Lab: This week we will discuss how to write a report and also mention how to perform unit tests in C++ and Python. This is not needed/required for project 1, but we encourage you to start thinking of it. The slides on how to write a project are at
http://compphysics.github.io/ComputationalPhysics/doc/pub/projectwriting/html/projectwriting.html