Massimo Ricotti

Astronomy 415: Spring 2007

This course will provide the astronomy student with a basic knowledge of numerical methods in astrophysics. By the end of the course students should be confortable working in a Unix environment, compiling and running codes, and employing a variety of visualization techniques to analyze the results. This process will be motivated by concrete examples of modern problems in astrophysics that demand numerical approaches.

Schedule

    Instructor:  Massimo Ricotti
    Class:       room CSS 2428
    Lectures:    Tuesday and Thursday from 12:30pm to 13:45pm
    First class: Th Jan 25 
    Last  class: Th May 10

What's New?

Contact info and Notes

This Course has been tought in previous years by Derek Richardson (currently on sabbatical leave). I plan to follow rather closely the syllabus and material (including notes and homework assignements) developed by Derek. My "native" programming language is the old Fortran77, but to make this course more young and exciting I will refresh my C knowledge and pretend I know how to program in C. Along the way I may complement the lectures with power point presentations available on the web on computational astrophysics. I will try to keep this webpage updated and link all the course material here.

• Office: room CSS 0213
• E-mail: ricotti "at" astro "dot" umd "dot" edu
• Phone: (301) 405 5097
• Office hours: Tuesday 4:00-5:00
• Class web page: http://www.astro.umd.edu/~ricotti/NEWWEB/teaching/current.html

Course Outline

The Syllabus is available in HTML and PDF format.

Textbooks

There are no required textbooks

Recommended:

Numerical recipes in Fortran [or in C], by Press, W.H. et al.

Course Grading

• Homework 80%
• Term Project 20%

There are no exams for this course. Class participation is strongly encouraged.

Class Survey Results

The level of computer and programming competence of the students in this class (measured the first day of class) is very heterogeneous as indicated by the result of the class survey. The survey results are available in HTML and PDF format. I will start the lectures with simple and, for some of you, obvious concepts and finish with more complex and challenging topics that may entertain the more experienced students in the class.

Homework

Homework will be assigned every week or every other week. Their due dates will be announced at the time they are assigned. On the due date the students will be expected to turn in their homework in class. The homework turned in will be graded and returned to the students. I will provide solutions and discuss them in class.

Link to Numerical Recipes sources in C and in Fortran: it is preferable to compile the recipes as separate files rather than cut and paste the functions into your source code.

Note that in order to use NRiC routines the easiest way is to nclude nr.h header file and nrutil.c and nrutil.h to use vectors and matrices. You can find these files here.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: I did not manage to convert HDF4 files into HDF5 format. I have posted 2 other files in NETCDF format. "Shock" is a simulation of an oblique shock in Cartesian coordinates (100x100x100) and "Bondi" is a simulation of Bondi accretion onto a moving point mass in spherical coordinates (200x100x100). Both simulations were created using a parallel version of VH1. I have also some tools to convert HDF4 files into text files or IFRIT file format. If you think you need these tools I can e-mail them upon request.

Tutorials

Old Class Notes

Useful Links