New Tools in Physics: Texts

Required Texts

• Numerical Recipes in C, W. H. Press, S. A. Teukolsky, W. T. Vetterling, and B. P. Flannery, Cambridge Univ. Press., 1992. ISBN 0-521-43108-5.
• The TeXbook, Donald E. Knuth, Addison Wesley, Reading, MA, 1986. ISBN 0-201-13448-9. TeX is the language in which we write all our papers.
• The C Programming Language, B. W. Kernighan and D. M. Ritchie, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. ISBN 0-13-110362-8. C is the language most of us use in writing programs. C++ and Fortran are also used, but we won't use them in this course.

  Mathematica and Maple are the two symbolic manipulation programs most commonly used in physics. Maple comes bundled with MatLab, which is a good interface to numerical analysis tools.

• Mathematica, Stephen Wolfram, Addison Wesley, Redwood City, CA, 1991. ISBN 0-201-51507-5.
• Maple/MatLab Text not chosen yet.Probably the "Student Edition of MatLab".
• HTML The language used to write hypertext on the World Wide Web. No text is necessary: the documentation is on the Web.

Optional Texts

• Tcl and the Tk Toolkit John K. Ousterhout, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA (1994). ISBN 0-201-63337-X
• Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk Brent B. Welch, Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River, NJ (1995). ISBN 0-13-182007-9 A pretty good set of tools for writing interactive programs. It isn't wonderfully efficient (either in time or space) but - like Mathematica - if the computer is overpowered, you'll get a nice result faster this way.

References (On Reserve in Library)

• Mathematical Methods of Classical Mechanics, V. I. Arnold, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1989. ISBN 0-387-96890-3. The most elegant book on classical mechanics, by one of the leaders in the field. We rely on Arnold's work heavily in our early work on planetary motion and the KAM theorem (Arnold is "A"). The body of the text writes classical Hamiltonian mechanics in the language of differential forms; our work lies mostly in the appendices, where you don't need the fancy mathematics.
• Ising model... Texts not chosen yet.
• Molecular dynamics... Texts not chosen yet.
• ``Iterative minimization techniques for ab initio total-energy calculations: molecular dynamics and conjugate gradients, M. C. Payne, M. P. Teter, D. C. Allan, T. A. Arias, and J. D. Joannopoulos, Reviews of Modern Physics 64, 1045 (1992). Mostly a discussion of the underlying justification and numerical methods underlying local density methods for electronic structure calculations. We'll be running a version of this code.
• Feigenbaum... Texts not chosen yet.
• Random Matrices, Localization, and UCF ... Texts not chosen yet.

Links Back

The Three Body Problem Set

New Tools in Physics: Course Description

Rockefeller Computer Network

LASSP Home Page, and Entertaining Science Done There,

James P. Sethna, sethna@lassp.cornell.edu.

Statistical Mechanics: Entropy, Order Parameters, and Complexity, now available at Oxford University Press (USA, Europe).

Statistical Mechanics: Entropy, Order Parameters, and Complexity, now available at Oxford University Press (USA, Europe).

Statistical Mechanics: Entropy, Order Parameters, and Complexity, now available at Oxford University Press (USA, Europe).