Projects in Scientific Computation

Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary book provides a compendium of projects, plus numerous example programs for readers to study and explore. Designed for advanced undergraduates or graduates 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". The projects were collected from research results and computational dilemmas during the authors tenure as Chief Scientist at NeXT Computer, and from his lectures 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 a combination of these, and is designed with an estimated level of difficulty. The support code for each takes the form of either C or Mathematica, and is included in the appendix and on the bundled diskette. The algorithms are clearly laid out within the projects, such that the book may be used with other symbolic numerical and algebraic manipulation products