Weekly update September 27

Dear all, 

last week we almost ended our discussion of eigenvalue solvers, chapter 7 of the lecture notes. This week on Thursday (tomorrow) we will use the first lecture to summarize our discussion of eigenvalue solver as well as project 2. This discussion includes also a mention of iterative eigenvalue solvers like Lanczos' method. 

Thereafter we begin with a new topic, namely the solution of ordinary differential equations. This material is covered by chapter 8 of the lecture notes. We will also use this to introduce and motivate the use of object orientation and classes. This lays also the ground for project 3, which deals with sets of coupled ordinary differential equations. Since we will have many such coupled equations with similar structures, object orientation makes life much easier. We start tomorrow with the basics behind the solution of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and on Friday we start discussing project 3 and object orientation (the lectures will  focus on object orientation  with c++).  For ODEs we will focus on two widely popular methods, the family of Verlet methods and the family of Runge-Kutta methods. The topic for project 3 is not yet finalized, but it will focus on ODEs with object orientation as an important programming aspect. 

We continue next week with a further discussion of ordinary differential equations before we the week thereafter start with numerical integration and Monte Carlo methods. 

At the lab this week we will have a Qt session this Thursday at 1215pm (only one session unfortunately) and the presentation will be given by Svenn-Arne Dragly who presently works for Qt while he is trying to finish his PhD in computational life science.

He did his master thesis on computational quantum mechanics. He is a professional programmer and has among other things developed Atomify (see https://www.naturfag.no/dataprogrambeskrivelse/vis.html?tid=2104431)

Best wishes to you all,

Morten