I will discuss differencing schemes for several kinds of hyperbolic equations, including hopefully how to handle rotating coordinate systems and superluminal boundaries in a stable manner. The problem of superluminal boundaries has direct application in treating computational boundaries at the surface of black holes.
No text will be required. Course materials will be distributed. Principal reference will be: Alcubierre and Schutz J. Computational Phys Vol 112 p44 (1994).
A very useful optional reference will be "Numerical Recipes" by Press et al.
Students will get logins to Relativity SGI workstations and the opportunity to use them for the class work. Programming will be developed from very simple starting problems. A knowledge of Fortran (or C) will be very useful, but serious students could learn all the needed Fortran in the context of the course.
There will be no homework nor final. Grades will be determined solely on the basis of participation in Class computational projects.
Week 1: (January 16-18) - signup, brief tutorial in logon, Fortran compilation and execution. - Project 1: explicit 3-level code for the one dimensional wave equation.
Richard Matzner RLM 9.208 471 5062