Matlab Projects for Scientists and Engineers

Matlab Projects for Scientists and Engineers is a lower-division workbook on computational physics.

General Information

This workbook serves as a computer programming supplement to Physics for Scientists and Engineers by Fishbane, Gasiorowicz and Thornton. The workbook contains 32 sections, each with a computer program written in MATLAB, that illustrate topics from the textbook. Each section reviews the relevant physics and describes how the program works. Sections contain five to seven exercises of varying difficulty. The easier exercises only require running a program and reporting the results while the most demanding can be major projects involving significant coding. The programs are short, usually less than 60 lines, and most produce graphical output (some with simple animations). The majority of the programs perform numerical calculations; however, Maple symbolic manipulation routines, built into the Student Edition of MATLAB, are used in several programs.

So if you are looking to add some programming projects to your lower-division physics courses, take a look at the preface and the table of contents of this workbook. You can also download some sample projects in Adobe Acrobat Reader (PDF) format:



Conservative forces and potential energy
Doppler effect for a moving observer
Entropy and disorder
Electric potential
Spherical mirrors
Lorentz transformations in special relativity




If you are searching for a copy, here is the relevant information:
Alejandro L. Garcia and Cecile Penland, Matlab Projects for Scientists and Engineers (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs NJ, 1996)
ISBN 0-13-460171-8

Related Links

FTP site for downloading programs from the book.

MathWorks Inc. WWW site (publisher of Matlab).

Prentice Hall's WWW site (textbook's publisher).

Author's homepage.