Computational Methods

Modern electronic computers owe their origin, to a large extent, to the needs in science and engineering. In the 50 years or so since their appearance, computers have out-performed their original goals of solving numerical problems and keeping tracks of information. They are now an essential tool in almost every aspect of the daily routines of engineers and scientists, from data collection to writing technical reports. The high speed of computation available to us these days opens up not only new ways of carrying out traditional tasks but also new areas of endeavor that have implications going well beyond what we can realize at the moment. Our concern here is limited to a small, albeit important, corner of the role of modern computers in science and engineering, namely some of the general techniques to solve common problems encountered in physics and engineering.