Introduction to Scientific Programming: Computational Problem Solving Using Mathematica(r) and C (Biological Physics)

“Introduction to Scientific Programming” was developed over a period of two years at the University of Utah Department of Computer Science in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Energy-funded Undergraduate Computation in Engineering Science (UCES) program. To encourage the integration of computation into the science and engineering curricula, an introductory course in computing was designed expressly for science and engineering students. This course was created to satisfy the standard programming requirement, while preparing students to immediatly expliot the broad power of modern computing in their sicence and engineering courses. The course has at least four distinguishing features: – It uses a sumbolic mathematics package (Mathematica) in combination with a conventional programming language (C). – It teaches programming concepts in parallel with a scientific problem-solving methodology. – It draws upon a variety of computational problems from the breadth of science and engineering to interest students and establish the relevance of the computational problem-solving approach. – The author has developed an extensive suite of interactive, on-line laboratory materials that students can use via any HTML viewer. All of the “Introduction to Scientific Programming” notes are available on -line and contain a number of embedded interactive URLs.