Physics 20 Reading List #9

Finally the last assignment! (Matt is away, but Michele will be in the lab on 5/24, and Pavlin on 5/25 and 6/1.) We've enjoyed having all of you in our lab. 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.