Projects in Scientific Computation

This interdisciplinary book provides a compendium of projects, together with a large number of example programs for readers to study and explore. The book is designed for advanced undergraduate or graduate students of science, mathematics and engineering who will deal with scientific computation in their future studies and research. It also contains new and useful reference materials for researchers. The problem sets range from the tutorial to exploratory and, at times, to “the impossible.” These projects were collected from research results and computational dilemmas during the author’s tenure as Chief Scientist at NeXT Computer, Inc. and from his scientific computation lectures in the Department of Physics at Reed College. The content assumes familiarity with such college topics as calculus, differential equations, and at least elementary programming. Each project focuses on computation, theory, graphics, or some combination of these, and is designed with an estimated level of difficulty. The support code for each project takes the form of either C or Mathematica, and is printing in the Appendix. The algorithms are clearly laid out within the text projects, so the book can be used with other symbolic numerical and algebraic manipulation products.