Student Survey (pdf)

Instructions (pdf)

Tutorial

Link to the class site on Springboard

1. Introduction, Kinematics - Introduction to Matlab, numerical derivatives
• Introduction
• Flow diagrams
• Van der Waals pressure and derivatives
• Relativistic kinematics
• Homework 1
• kinematics.m
• testderiv.m

 
2. Nuclear decay and bacterial growth - solving simple ODEs
• Numerical methods to solve first order ODEs
• Matlab functions I
• Series expansions
• Homework 2
• ode1nuc.m
• f1nuc.m
• exactnuc.m

 
3. Projectile motion - Second order ordinary differential equations
• Introduction to projectile motion
• Effect of air resistance
• Homework 3
• odefall2d.m
• fall2d.m
• odedragfall.m
• dragfall.m

 
4. Oscillators in one dimension - Simple and damped harmonic motion and the pendulum
• Introduction to the harmonic oscillator
• The damped harmonic oscillator
• Phase space of the pendulum
• Homework 4
• odeharmonic.m
• harmonic.m
• Matlab functions II
• odesho.m
• sho.m
• odesho_ext.m
• call_ode_sho.m
• odesho_three.m
• odesho_for_loop_simple.m
• odesho_for_loop.m
• odesho_for_array.m

 
5. Conservative forces
• Conservative forces
• Homework 5

 
6. Damped and driven oscillations - chaos in dissipative and Hamiltonian systems
• Damped and driven oscillations
• Chaos in the damped and driven pendulum
• Stadium billiard with soft repulsive walls
• Homework 6
• odechaos.m
• tochaos.m
• stadium.m
• softbilliard.m
• faccstadium.m
• fstadium.m

 
7. Midterm Exam
• Midterm
• two_dim_potential.m

 
8. Random walks
• Introduction to probability
• Random Systems
• Diffusion equation for random walks
• Drude model for electrical conduction
• Homework 7
• MCintegration.m
• diffusion_randomwalk.m
• randmod.m

 
9. Ising model and Metropolis Monte Carlo
• Importance sampling as a Markov Process
• Ising model and Monte Carlo simulations
• Homework 8
• ising_visual.m
• isingT.m