The materials that can be downloaded from this page are in the Adobe® Portable Document Format, or PDF. If you do not have a PDF file reader, please download a free copy of the Adobe® Acrobat® Reader directly from Adobe® .
The materials that can be downloaded from this page are in the Adobe® Portable Document Format, or PDF. If you do not have a PDF file reader, please download a free copy of the Adobe® Acrobat® Reader directly from Adobe® .
Physics 150 Syllabus
Physics 150 Lab Manual
It is useful to learn how to use a computer algebra system such as Maple® or Mathematica® in the advanced physics courses. Maple® and Mathematica® are commercial products and are fairly expensive. However, there are a few free computer algebra programs available on the net. Macsyma, probably the oldest computer algebra system, was developed at MIT. The program evolved into several different versions, one of which was a commercial program that seems to have died only a few years ago. Another offshoot, Maxima, was developed with Department of Energy money and was released under the GPL relatively recently. You can get Maxima and wxMaxima for Windows and Mac OS X below.
Maxima 5.30.0 for Windows
Maxima 5.30.0 for Mac OS X
There is also a Maxima Home Page on Sourceforge.
Axiom is another computer algebra system, which you can read about and download from Axiom Home Page . Axiom used to be a commerical product but is now under GPL.
Some very good recent news is that the program Reduce is now free and open-source. Reduce, originally written for high energy theoretical physics research, at roughly forty years old is probably the second oldest computer algebra system. You can find a copy for Windows and Mac OS X on the Reduce Sourceforge page . Either Reduce or Maxima are worth learning and becoming proficient at using.
For more numerical work, the free software Octave is very useful. Octave is nearly 100% compatible with MatLab. You can download binary versions for Windows and Mac OS X below.
Octave for Windows
Octave.app for Mac OS X
Students learn the TeX typesetting system in the laboratory portion of PHYS 270. If you do not have a working installation of TeX, I recommend TeX Live, which is actively maintained. For Mac OS X, there's MacTeX, which is built on TeX Live. You can obtain a copy below.