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About the author
Joseph Boudreau is a professor of physics at the University of Pittsburgh. He obtained his B.A. degree from Harvard University and his Ph.D from the University of Wisconsin. As an experimental particle physicist he has concentrated on precision measurements in electroweak physics in the ALEPH experiment at CERN, on bottom physics at the CDF experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator laboratory, and on top quark physics at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.
He is a former CERN associate, and has held invited positions at Fermilab, University of Oxford, and the Center for Particle Physics of Marseille (CPPM).
Eric Swanson is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. He obtained his PhD from the University of Toronto in 1991 and subsequently spent three years at MIT and six years at North Carolina State before moving to Pittsburgh. He has published more than 100 papers on theoretical hadronic physics, condensed matter physics, and biophysics. Swanson was named an APS Fellow for his work on exotic particles and is a founder of the Topical Group on Hadronic Physics of the American Physical Society.
He has been a visiting scientist at Oxford University, TRIUMF in British Columbia, Jefferson Lab in Virginia, and Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Summary
Applied Computational Physics is a graduate-level text stressing three essential elements: advanced programming techniques, numerical analysis, and physics. The goal of the text is to provide students with essential computational skills that they will need in their careers, and to increase the confidence with which they write computer programs designed for their problem domain. The physics problems give them an opportunity to reinforce their programming
skills, while the acquired programming skills augment their ability to solve physics problems. The C language is used throughout the text. Physics problems include Hamiltonian systems, chaotic systems, percolation, critical phenomena, few-body and multi-body quantum systems, quantum field theory, simulation of
radiation transport, and data modeling.
The book, the fruit of a collaboration between a theoretical physicist and an experimental physicist, covers a broad range of topics from both viewpoints. Examples, program libraries, and additional documentation can be found at the companion website. Hundreds of original problems reinforce programming skills and increase the ability to solve real-life physics problems at and beyond the graduate level.
