Thoroughly revised for its second edition, this advanced textbook provides an introduction to the basic methods of computational physics, and an overview of progress in several areas of scientific computing by relying on free software available from CERN. The book begins by dealing with basic computational tools and routines, covering approximating functions, differential equations, spectral analysis, and matrix operations. Important concepts are illustrated by relevant examples at each stage.

The author also discusses more advanced topics, such as molecular dynamics, modeling continuous systems, Monte Carlo methods, genetic algorithm and programming, and numerical renormalization. It includes many more exercises. This can be used as a textbook for either undergraduate or first-year graduate courses on computational physics or scientific computation...

Gauss's law for electric fields, Gauss's law for magnetic fields, Faraday's law, and the Ampere-Maxwell law are four of the most influential equations in science. In this guide for students, each equation is the subject of an entire chapter, with detailed, plain-language explanations of the physical meaning of each symbol in the equation, for both the integral and differential forms. The final chapter shows how Maxwell's equations may be combined to produce the wave equation, the basis for th...