Announcements/deadlines
February 16, 2008
Only one man truly understood America,
HST. Read this and stand in awe of a man who possessed a real grasp of our times. It may seem slightly cynical to you, if so the correct conclusion is that you have a lot to learn.
February 6, 2008
To date I have found two typos (other than spelling/punctuation) in the handouts; Equation 4.42 should NOT have the 1/2 factor, and the bottom equation on page 67, problem 37, needs a factor of
p multiplying the
q-dot term on the let hand side.
January 27, 2008
Ode.exe Ode for Windows, cross-compiled. To use it non-interactively you will need the
cat command, which you can get by installing
coreutils-5.3.0.exe (the "setup" version). Then use it to pipe one of your ode scripts into ode.exe with
cat script | ode.exe > outputfile, and graph outputfile with gnuplot. If you get an error "can't find MSVCP60.dll", get it from
here, unpack it and put it in the same folder as ode.exe. I have tested this process on Win2k.
January 2, 2008
Re-organization of the course website. The syllabus is under revision, some materials are not available yet.
January, 2 2008
Text is "Quantum Mechanics" by Albert Messiah, Dover 0-486-40924-4, paperback (both volumes published as one), $29.95.
January, 2 2008
You will need access to a computer with a programming environment, just about any language will do (but I will provide samples in C and C++). Either obtain a UNIX account from me, or download and install Msys and MingW on a Windows computer (links are below). To do graphics and animation with C/C++ on Windows with Msys and MingW, download
g2, put its *.h files in your MingW/include directory, and the libg2.a file in your MingW/lib directory. To test your installation, download
g2_shm.c, compile it with "gcc g2_shm.c -DWIN32 -lg2 -lm -lkernel32 -lgdi32 -luser32 -lcomdlg32 -o g2_shm.exe", and double click on the g2_shm.exe file. If it runs, you are all set.
Links
Online information on how to use
octave, ode, graph, gnuplot, GiNaC and
maxima is available
here.
Sick of using Adobe PDF reader , try
Foxit Reader 2.2 if you want PDF's
to open instantly. Uses less than 3Mbytes of space.
Reader and browser-plugins for
djvu file format. Some material will be made av
ailable in this format due to its superiority over PDF. Also see
http://www.djvu.org/ and
http://djvu.sourceforge.net/ for UNIX and MacOS, and
Li
zardtech for an excellent browser plugin.
Free graphing software;
gnuplot .
All graphics for eJournal reports should be publication quality, so use graph (from libplot) or gri. The WIN32 versions of these programs run best from a DOS command shell, and produce postscript readable with the lastest vesions of
Ghostscript 8.61 and
gsview-4.9. Updates will be found at
the ghostscript website.
Sage is a free and open-source alternative to Mathematica.
g2 is a cross-platform C/C++/FORTRAN/Perl/Python graphics and animation library that we will make use of.
Gnu plotutils is a more mature and feature-rich library, along with
ode and
graph, which we will use extensively.
GiNaC is a library for computer symbolic manipulation. We will use it in the course. Get
CLN too.
Octave is a free matrix manipulation program that you may find useful in matrix mechanics applications.
Maxima is a useful (free) Mathematica replacement that you may find helpful for some types of data analysis.
This course accepts reports in LaTeX only. You can obtain
fptex, a free TeX/LaTeX installation for Windows. All Linux distributions contain TeX/LaTeX.
Miktex is another (free) TeX/LaTeX installation for Windows.
All Linux installations have C/C++/Fortran/Perl/Java/Python compilers or interpreters. For Windows you can obtain
Mingw32, a UNIX shell and development environment with C/C++/Fortran compilers.
Cygnus Toolkit for 95/98/NT is another alternative. See the
Physics 499 website for a compact WIN32 native compiler and library kit.
I prefer to be contacted by email. Direct all questions to jeff@rustam.uwp.edu.
