FenggShui
Here I collect interesting problems that I think everyone who is only slightly lazy and hence would like a computer to do all the legwork for them should be able to do, especially if their profession is physics or something along these lines. Choose what ever language pleases you, I will try and post example solutions for each one. As I am a lazy git they will most probably be written in Python(the snake that comes with batteries included!) and the tremendous collection of cleverness that is SciPy.
I had a quick google and found"Handbook of the Physics Computing Course", these are lecture notes from a course aimed at first-year undergraduates at Oxford Uni. More information about it on http://www.pentangle.net/python/.
Problems
An experiment measures a quantity every five minutes and records the value in a text file. The experiment runs for the whole weekend, in order to make some sense of the data
- write a program that reads those numbers in
- computes some statistics like the mean, standard deviation and so on
- plots a graph of time vs value
Given the angular distribution recorded by a detector in a electron scattering experiment, compute the "radius" of the target nuclei.
Fit some functions to real data sets. A very popular method seems to be the "least squares" fit, are there other methods? Are they better? Can we fit only straight lines using the "least squares" method? How can we fit say a parabola, a Gaussian, exponential decay or a spline to data?
more to come.
Princeton CS dept has a list of fun assignments, make sure to check the "nifty" ones at the bottom.
Related pages on CategoryUniversity and CategoryPython