Computational physics

The course covers problems in 4 broad sections:1. Ordinary differential equations, such as those of classical mechanics.2. Partial differential equations, such as Maxwell's equations and the Diffusion and Schrödinger equations.3. Matrix methods, such as systems of equations and eigenvalue problems applied to Poisson's equation and electronic structure calculations.4. Monte Carlo and other simulation methods, such as the Metropolis algorithm and molecular dynamics. This book is intended to be a complete introduction to Mathematica. It describes essentially all the capabilities of Mathematica, assuming no prior knowledge of the system. This book covers user-level interaction with Mathematica. Mathematica is a system build on a fairly small set of very powerful principles. This book describes those principles, but by no means spells out all of their implications. This book describes the standard Mathematica kernel, as it exists on all computers that run Mathematica. All supported features of the kernel in Mathematica Version 2 are covered in this book. This book describes what readers should do when interacting directly with the Mathematica kernel. Mathematica is an open software system that can be customized in a wide variety of ways. It is important to realize that this book covers only the basic Mathematica system. If the system readers are using has been customized in any way, then Mathematica may behave differently from what is described in this book This book will be released simultaneously with Release 2.0 of Mathematica and will cover all the new features of Release 2.0. This new edition maintains the format of the original book and is the single most important user guide and reference for Mathematica--all users of Mathematica will need this edition. Includes 16 pages of full-color graphics.