MSPH306

Lab Exercises and other course material for MSPH306 - Computational Physics

Taught at the Department of Physics, The University of Burdwan

The simulations are written in the Python programming language.

The website for this Course is @ https://bit.ly/msph306

You can also scan this QR-code to access this website:

Table of Contents

• MSPH306
• Table of Contents
• For C programmers
• List of Lab Exercises
• Additional Notes
• Extra Tutorials and Resources:
• Suggested Textbooks:
• License
• Author

For C programmers

If you have any prior programming experience in C or a similar language like C++ or FORTRAN, you can get a quick overview of python in the notebook linked below:

• Python for C Programmers

List of Lab Exercises

Use the following links:

Lab no.	Lab Notebooks	Google Colab Links
Lab 01	Introduction to Python
Lab 02	Basic Programming I
Lab 03	Basic Programming II
Lab 04	Introduction to NumPy
Lab 05	Introduction to Matplotlib
Lab 06	Curve-fitting with Scipy
Lab 07	Linear Algebra with NumPy
lab 08	Ordinary Differential Equations

Additional Notes

• Most of the the computers in the lab are connected to the internet. However, some of the linux machines in the lab have depleted CMOS batteries, so the clocks are not set to the proper date or time.The internet will not work properly if this is the case. In order to set the date and time manually, perform the following steps

  1. Open the Show Applications menu in the bottom-left corner.
  2. Type Date & Time in the search field and select the Date & Time option.
  3. Deselect the Automatic Date & Time option, as well as the Automatic Time Zone option, then set the Date & Time manually using values from your mobile phone. Finally, set the timezone to Kolkata/India.
  4. If the date and time are correct, then internet access should be working.

• In order to run these exercises locally in your home computer, perform the following steps.

  1. Install GitHub Desktop after downloading it from its website @ desktop.github.com
  2. Then, download this repository by cloning it using GitHub Desktop (see this doc for details). The web address of this repository is https://github.com/hariseldon99/msph306
  3. Download and install the miniforge python distribution. For details, goto https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge, or this webpage: https://fabienmaussion.info/intro_to_programming/week_01/01-Installation.html
  4. Once miniforge is installed, then start the miniforge prompt and install jupyter via the mamba installer. For details, see https://fabienmaussion.info/intro_to_programming/week_02/01-Install-jupyter.html.
  5. For VSCode users: See this link for setting up VSCode with jupyter: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/datascience/jupyter-notebooks

Extra Tutorials and Resources:

• Youtube Video Instrutions for installing Anaconda Python (in Bangla)

• Video lecture series in Python programming (in Bengali) by Anisul Islam

• Python Video Tutorials in Bengali (for beginners, check video description for further lectures):

• Introduction to Jupyter Notebooks

• Easy Introduction to SciPy

• Easy NumPy/SciPy/Matplotlib Tutorial

• Scientific Python Tutorials (including NumPy and Matplotlib)

• Computational Physics using python: Learning material hosted by the Department of Physics, The University of Toronto

• For a quick introduction to the Python programming language, as well as Numerical Python, Scientific Python and Matplotlib, see this tutorial

• For a more detailed introduction to the abovementioned topics, see Robert Johansson's Scientific Python Lectures.

Suggested Textbooks:

1. Yashavant Kanetkar, Let Us Python, (3rd Ed.), ISBN: 9789388511568

2. Alex Gezerlis, Numerical Methods in Physics with Python. Cambridge University Press; 2020. ISBN: 9781009303866

3. Abhijit Kar Gupta, Scientific Computing in Python, ISBN: 9788194956761. Author Website.

4. Christian Hill, Learning Scientific Programming with Python. ISBN: 9781107428225. Book Website

5. Robert Johansson, Numerical Python: A Practical Techniques Approach for Industry, ISBN: 9781484205549, Developer Website.

License

This work is licensed under a GPL License

Author

Analabha Roy
Assistant Professor,
Department of Physics,
The University of Burdwan
Bardhaman, India 713104
Webpage: https://www.ph.utexas.edu/~daneel