Fifty Solitaires – Piling it Up
Posted 16th March 2022 by Holger Schmitz
So here is the third instalment of my Solitaire card game. In the previous post, I created the basic Card component and set up Storybook to let me browse and test my components while developing them. Today, I will create another component that displays a collection of cards. In a Solitaire game, cards are arranged […]
Computational Physics Basics: Piecewise and Linear Interpolation
Posted 24th February 2022 by Holger Schmitz
One of the main challenges of computational physics is the problem of representing continuous functions in time and space using the finite resources supplied by the computer. A mathematical function of one or more continuous variables naturally has an infinite number of degrees of freedom. These need to be reduced in some manner to be […]
The Harmonic Oscillator
Posted 11th February 2022 by Holger Schmitz
I wasn’t really planning on writing this post. I was preparing a different post when I found that I needed to explain a property of the so-called “harmonic oscillator”. I first thought about adding a little excursion into the article that I was going to write. But I found that the harmonic oscillator is such […]
Fifty Solitaires – It’s in the Cards
Posted 8th December 2021 by Holger Schmitz
This is the second instalment of my series in which I am developing a JavaScript solitaire game that allows the player to choose between many different rules of Solitaire. As I explained in my previous post, the motivation for this project came from an old bet that I made with a friend of mine. The […]
Frege’s Numbers
Posted 19th November 2021 by Holger Schmitz
In a previous post, I started talking about natural numbers and how the Peano axioms define the relation between natural numbers. These axioms allow you to work with numbers and are good enough for most everyday uses. From a philosophical point of view, the Peano axioms have one big drawback. They only tell us how […]
Computational Physics: Truncation and Rounding Errors
Posted 15th October 2021 by Holger Schmitz
In a previous post, I talked about accuracy and precision in numerical calculations. Ideally one would like to perform calculations that are perfect in these two aspects. However, this is almost never possible in practical situations. The reduction of accuracy or precision is due to two numerical errors. These errors can be classified into two […]
Fifty Solitaires – A Beginning
Posted 22nd September 2021 by Holger Schmitz
Many years ago, when I was a physics student and I was just getting to know the ins and outs of programming, I made a bet with a friend of mine. At the time my mother was into solitaire card games, the ones with real cards you play on the kitchen table. This was before […]
Multi Slit Interference
Posted 11th September 2021 by Holger Schmitz
This week I have been playing around with my electromagnetic wave simulation code MPulse. The code simulates Maxwell’s equations using an algorithm known as finite-difference time-domain, FDTD for short. Here, I am simulating the wave interference pattern behind the screen with n slits. For $n=1$ there is only one slit and no interference at all. […]
Computational Physics Basics: Accuracy and Precision
Posted 24th August 2021 by Holger Schmitz
Problems in physics almost always require us to solve mathematical equations with real-valued solutions, and more often than not we want to find functional dependencies of some quantity of a real-valued domain. Numerical solutions to these problems will only ever be approximations to the exact solutions. When a numerical outcome of the calculation is obtained […]
Computational Physics Basics: Floating Point Numbers
Posted 25th May 2021 by Holger Schmitz
In a previous contribution, I have shown you that computers are naturally suited to store finite length integer numbers. Most quantities in physics, on the other hand, are real numbers. Computers can store real numbers only with finite precision. Like storing integers, each representation of a real number is stored in a finite number of […]