There is only a very limited number of physical systems that can be exactly described in terms of simple analytic functions. There are, however, a vast range of problems which are amenable to a computational approach. This book provides a concise, self-contained introduction to the basic numerical and analytic techniques, which form the foundations of the algorithms commonly employed to give a quantitative description of systems of genuine physical interest. The methods developed are applied to representative problems from classical and quantum physics.

Autorentext

Colm T. Whelan is a Professor of Physics and an Eminent Scholar at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He received his Ph.D. in Theoretical Atomic Physics from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and was awarded an Sc.D. also from Cambridge in 2001. He is a Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics (UK). He has over 30 years of experience in the teaching of physics.

Inhalt
Preface.- Preliminaries.- Some Elementary Results.- The Numerical Solution of Ordinary Differential Equations.- Case Study: Damped and Driven Oscillations.- Numerical Linear Algebra.- Polynomial Approximations.- Sturm--Liouville Theory.- Case Study: The Quantum Oscillator.- Variational Principles.- Case Study: The Ground State of Atoms.- Bibliography.- Author's Biography.- Index .