arthurto / cphy

Class materials for computational physics course

(Left to Right): Avalanche activity cascades in a sandpile automaton; a vortex street formed by flow past a cylinder; and Turing patterns in a reaction-diffusion model. All simulations from the course homeworks; a higher-resolution video may be viewed here

Computational Physics

Summary

Materials for UT Austin's graduate computational physics course, taught in Fall 2022 by William Gilpin.

This course aims to provide a very broad survey of computational methods that are particularly relevant to modern physics research. We will aim to cover efficient algorithm design and performance analysis, traditional numerical recipes such as integration and matrix manipulation, and emerging methods in data analysis and machine learning. Our goal by the end of the class will be to feel comfortable approaching diverse, open-ended computational problems that arise during research, and to be ready to design and share new algorithms with the broader research community.

The class website is located here. If you are enrolled in the course at UT, the syllabus and calendar are here

Contents

• HW1: The sandpile cellular automaton and directed percolation. Covers recursion, runtime scaling, vectorization

• HW2: Linear dynamical systems and decomposing a chaotic flow. Covers numerical linear algebra, optimization, and unsupervised learning

• HW3: Turing patterns and phase separation. Covers numerical integration; finite-difference and spectral methods

• HW4: Predicting turbulence with operator methods. Covers Supervised learning, time series forecasting, ridge, kernel, and logistic regression

• Homework solutions

• Lab 1: Getting started with Python

• Lab 2: git, GitHub, and GitHub Pages

• Lab 3: Documentation and Formatting

• Lecture: Python for Scientific Computing, Vectorization, and the Mandelbrot set

• Lecture: Inheritance, Object-Oriented Program, and the Game of Life

• Lecture: Recursion and the Fast Fourier Transform

• Lecture: Numerical Methods, Condition Number, Preconditioning

• Lecture: Matrix inversion and LU factorization

• Lecture: The QR algorithm for eigenvalues

Fixes, typos, and improvements

If you find any errors or typos, please open an issue or submit a correction as a pull request on GitHub.

Please let us know if you find these materials helpful, so that we can keep track of the course's impact, which could potentially help us extend this course in future years.

Course-related questions are best posted on GitHub as Discussions or Issues on the course repository; for other issues, I be reached via email

Requirements

We will primarily use Python 3 with the following packages

• numpy
• matplotlib
• scipy
• scikit-learn
• jupyter

For projects and other parts of the class, you might also need

• ipykernel
• scikit-image
• umap-learn
• statsmodels
• pytorch
• jax
• numba

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