Materials for Courses taught by T. J. Allen
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Introductory Physics - Physics 150 Fall 2008
Physics 150 Syllabus
Physics 150 Practice Exam 1
Physics 150 Practice Exam 2
Physics 150 Practice Final Exam
Relativity, Spacetime, and Gravity - Physics 370 Fall 2008 Hobart & William Smith Colleges
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 fairly expensive. However,
there are a few free computer algebra programs available on the net.
Macsyma, one of the oldest computer algebra systems, was developed at MIT.
The program evolved into several different versions, one of which was
a commercial program that died only a few years ago. Another, Maxima,
was developed with Department of Energy money and was released under the
GPL relatively recently.
You can get Maxima for Windows here.
Maxima 5.9.2 for Windows
Just in case you're interested, the full source code is available too. (The
license requires that the source be available whenever a pre-compiled
version is provided, but for the purposes of this course you can just
ignore it.) There is also a
Maxima Home Page on Sourceforge . Maxima for the Macintosh can be
installed using FinkCommander if you have the X11 Window system and
FinkCommander packages installed on your Mac. Axiom is another computer
algebra system, which you can read about and download from Axiom
FrontPage . Axiom used to be a commerical product but is now
under GPL. Don't ask me how to use Axiom, but you can ask me simple
questions about Maxima.
Physics 370 Syllabus
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