Physics 20 reading list for the week of 2/28/2005

Finally the last assignment! (There will be sections next week on Tuesday and Wednesday, but no new readings or assignment.) We've enjoyed having all of you in our lab. You're welcome to come back in the Spring term for ph21. To get an idea of what we're doing there, have a look at the current ph21 webpage, or speak to some of your peers who have been taking ph21 this term.

Don't forget to turn in your course evaluations: in the past, this lab has benefited greatly from such feedback. I would also welcome your direct feedback about the assignments, the software and hardware environment in the lab, the TAs, and whatever else you want. Just e-mail me (replace the spam-avoiding {at}).

Your first reading assignment for this week is about numerical root-finding methods: Secs. 9.0, 9.1, 9.2 (to p. 357 only), and 9.4 of Numerical Recipes.

On the golden ratio, see the MathWorld entry by Eric Weisstein. In fact, you'll probably find more on the web than you'll ever want to know about the golden ratio and the related Fibonacci numbers, which seem to be a favorite subject for term papers in high school. (By the way, the standard aspect ratio for Mathematica plots is once more the golden ratio...)

Finally, I wanted to alert you to Computing in Science and Engineering, an excellent IEEE publication on computational techniques and computer simulation. You may have to log in through the Caltech Library page to actually access the articles.