Developing Components and Curricula for a Research-Rich Undergraduate Degree in Computational Physics

Abstract. A four-year undergraduate curriculum leading to a Bachelor’s degree in Computational Physics is described. The courses, texts, and seminars are research- and Web-rich, and culminate in an Advanced Computational Science Laboratory derived from graduate theses and research from NPACI centers and national laboratories. There are important places for Maple, Java, MathML, MatLab, C and Fortran in the curriculum. 1 Overview We are presently experiencing historically rapid advances in science, technology, and education driven by a dramatic increase in the power and use of computers. Whereas a decade ago computational science educators were content to have undergraduates view scientific computation as “black boxes” and to wait for graduate school for them to learn what is inside the boxes [1], our increasing reliance on computers makes this less true today, and much less true in the future. To adjust to changes in scientific computing, we are developing a fouryear, research-r...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: ICCS
• Authors: Rubin H. Landau
• Keywords: Advanced Computational Science, Applied Computing, Computational Physics, Computational Science, ICCS 2001