Status Updates From Computational Physics

Good examples for runge-kutta 4 methodology. Very useful

The class I've been taking for this textbook has been so rewarding. Literally just me in a class, being taught my a Cambridge Physics PhD graduate. In love with this learning process of my life right now.

Clearly, I'm in the thick of my spring quarter.

The principles of Gaussian quadrature are interesting. Also the footnote on more complicated techniques such as Clenshaw-Curtis and Gauss-Kronrod rules was helpful. It seems, however, that so long as I am using Mathematica at the moment, basic integration (not huge calculations for clusters etc.) is better done by Mathematica.

Damn it, it took me 1.5 hours to get Romberg integration right, even though the total lines of code for intermediate steps is only 15 lines. I need more experience...

Tomorrow's exercise: implementing Romberg integration rule.

Error estimation of Simpson's rule and trapezoid rule, first time I saw it explicitly.

Finished Chapter 4; the examples are easy enough that I don't see the need to do it explicitly. An interesting refresher about accuracy and error, and how to estimate the number of operations to be reasonable time. TLDR for speed: ~ 1 billion operations is reasonable time.

Too oddly long time to do Mandelbrot set.

Skipped animation section. Before going to next chapter, try the logistic map and Mandelbrot set.

Started Chapter 3, skipped scatter plot. The 2D contour plot I will focus on just producing interference pattern tomorrow.

Finished the basics in Chapter 2. Glad to see that I can still do prime factorization code.

For subsequent chapters I will be selective somewhat, but try to learn the essence of everything (but less complete).

User-defined functions.