Dreyer-Research-Group

PHY 604: Computational Methods in Physics and Astrophysics II

Instructor: Cyrus Dreyer, Physics B104, cyrus.dreyer@stonybrook.edu
*Office Hours: By appointment
Syllabus

Lectures, example programs, readings, etc.

Lecture 1: Intro and basics of computation

• Lecture 1 slides
• Readings:
• What every computer scientist should know about floating-point arithmetic
• Wikipedia page on the Floating Point
• Wikipedia page on the Kahan Summation Algorithm
• Example programs:
• Fortran program for calcuating factorial
• Python program for calcuating factorial
• Fortran program for finding machine $\epsilon$
• Python program for converting decimal to binary

Lecture 2: Good programming practices

• Lecture 2 slides
• Readings:
• Pro Git book
• Fortran best practices
• Good enough practices in scientific computing
• Example programs:
• Python program for matrix inversion including unit test

Lecture 3: Good practices and numerical differentiation

• Lecture 3 slides
• Readings:
• Wikipedia page on finite difference coefficients
• Wikipedia page on Make
• Blog on numerical differentiation
• Example programs:
• Fortran makefile example

Lecture 4: Numerical integration

• Lecture 4 slides
• Example programs:
• Jupyter notebook exploring numerical integration of Fresnel function

Homeworks

Homework 1 (Due 09/17/25)

• Homework 1
• Instructions