Weekly plans and update for week 43

Hi everybody, some good news. Tomorrow and Friday we are back to the in-person labs. We are extremely happy with this since the labs are essential to this course and we hope you find them useful. This year we have many more sessions and teachers. This allows us to interact hopefully much more with you. The digital labs are also run as usual, one tomorrow at 4pm-6pm and one on Friday at 2pm-4pm. Feel free to attend these also if you cannot come in person. This week we will try to wrap up project 3 during the labs and we hope you all are doing well.

Else, last week we ended our discussion of standard integration methods (gaussian quadrature, chapter 5 of the lecture notes) and we started with Monte carlo methods (chapter 11 of the lecture notes). Our first encounter is Monte Carlo integration and we will discuss this tomorrow (see sections 11.4 and 11.5 of the lecture notes). On Friday we start with Markov chains, random walks and discus the Metropolis algorithm. This serves as our starting point for project 4.  Next week we will apply the Metropolis algo to studies of phase transitions using a widely popular model, the so-called Ising model (the topic of project 4).    The Ising model is a simple binary system which has been applied to studies of phase transition in physics or studies of markov chains in statistics, or to simulate results of elections in countries with a two-party system (see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-26919-y) or to simulate dialects among bird songs!! (I am not pulling your leg, see https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.93.062402). 

have fun and we look forward to see you again,

the fys3150/4150 gang