Intro to Scientific Computing PHYS 27/193 Physics Department University of the Pacific

Introduction

In this course we will learn some of the basic techiniques involved in using your computer to do scientific tasks. Since our course has students with different experience using computers, some tasks will be familiar (I hope to start out that way), and some (hopefully) will not. Along the way, I hope to add a few simple applications to your computer that will help you be a better scientist, engineer, mathematician, (or philosopher, astronomer, accountant, of whatever it is that you do).

The tools (software) and techniques that you use when doing science with your computer, are somewhat different than those that you use when you use your computer for doing other, non-scientific, tasks. Let's examine the differences between these two ways of using your computer. That will help us outline the things that we will study in this course.

Non-scientific computing:

While you might do several of the following things in the course of some scientific project, these computer activities would not be considered scientific computing

• Email
• Surfing the Internet
  
• Word Processing (non-scientific)
• Using a spreadsheet for bookeeping or tabulating things.
• Listening to / downloading / making music
• Editing movies
• Storing pictures
• Gaming

Scientific Computing:

When using your computer for science, you do many different things. These might include

• Analyzing data, for example:
  • doing statistics on data to compare with theories
  • curve fitting to find mathematical relations in data
• Visualizing data and mathematical functions: graphing
• Doing symbolic mathematics: algebra and calculus using the computer
• Numerical calculations:
  • computing numerical approximations to mathematical quantites like definate integrals
  • linear algebra (vector and matrix computations)
  • solving systems of linear equations
  • solving non-linear equations
  • solving differential equations
  • and much more...
• Scientific publication
• Scientific programming
• Recording data from experiments (not covered in this course)

It is these types of scientific tasks that we will cover in this course (except the last item). Many of these topics are the subject of Ph.D. theses, and one could devote decades to learning how to do them well. Our goal is much simpler: to just introduce you to them in order to get you started. With just that, and a little diligence (i.e. webhunting for examples and tutorials) you'll be surprised how much more useful your computer can be.

First, we must setup a scientific computing environment on your computer. This simply means getting applications to do these things. It turns out most of them are free.

This is the topic of our next discussion.

NEXT: Scientific Computing Environment