Scientific Computing Links

Books That I Recommend

• General
  • Scientific computing: an introductory survey, M. T. Heath, book's bibliography, see errata too. The best introductory book on scientific computing I've seen. Doesn't cover wavelets.
  • Numerical Recipes in C: The art of scientific computation, 2nd edition, W.H. Press et al., book available online! A "cookbook" for scientific computing; quite helpful and very widely used. This book covers a lot of ground concisely, but many experts say that obsolete methods are presented, and that the code is too FORTRAN-like. Reviews of the book (you'll need to scroll down) (many reviews are critical).

• Specialized
  • Introduction to Wavelets and Wavelet Transforms: A Primer, Sidney Burrus, Ramesh Gopinath, and Haitao Guo, 1998. Good introductory wavelets textbook.
  • The World According to Wavelets: The Story of a Mathematical Technique in the Making, Barbara Burke Hubbard. A very accessible book on the history and applications of wavelets. Not the best book to learn about the details of their mathematics or algorithms, however.
  • Numerical Analysis, 2nd edition, David Kincaid and Ward Cheney. One of the best textbooks on numerical analysis (which is a subtopic of scientific computing, more focused on error analysis and derivation of algorithms than on their applications).
  • Matrix Computations, Gene Golub and Charles van Loan, The bible on algorithms for solving linear systems and eigenvalue problems (subtopics of scientific computing).
  • Applied Numerical Linear Algebra, James Demmel, More focused and more current than Golub's book. Does a nice job of comparing algorithms.
  • The Geometry Toolbox for Graphics and Modeling, Gerald Farin and Dianne Hansford, Not really a scientific computing book. The best presentations I've seen of geometric explanations and intuition for matrices, eigenvalues, and other linear algebra concepts. Aimed at freshman/sophomore undergrad level, but useful for anyone who uses this stuff.
  • A Multigrid Tutorial, 2nd edition, William L. Briggs, Van Emden Henson, Steve F. McCormick. Best book on this particular way of solving certain PDE & linear systems. Multigrid methods are extremely fast, when they work, but they're not applicable to all problems.
  • Ordinary Differential Equations, V. I. Arnold. Not numerically oriented, but has great sketches of diff. eq's.
  • Differential Equations with Applications and Historical Notes, George F. Simmons. An excellent textbook, also not numerically oriented.

Other Books, That I Don't Know So Well

• The PDE Coffee Table Book, in progress, Kristine Embree and Nick Trefethen, info , more info (this sounds cool!)
• Visual Quantum Mechanics - nice pictures!
• numerical analysis book list by Matthias Gobbert, annotated
• numerical methods book list, Sweden

Courses Related to Scientific Computing at Carnegie Mellon University

• Computer Science Dept.: 15-853, Algorithms in the Real World, Guy Blelloch and Bruce Maggs. schedule of CS Dept. graduate courses, Fall 2000
• Robotics Institute: 16-811, Math Fundamentals for Robotics, Mike Erdmann
• Math Dept.: Current offerings , Grad course descriptions, (see Numerical Methods, Numerical Analysis, Finite Element Methods, Numerical Solution of ...) Tutuncu teaches optimization. Ta'asan does multigrid.
• Civil and Environmental Engineering Dept.: courses. See Omar Ghattas
• Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept. (see Linear System Theory, Circuit Simulation, and others)
• Mechanical Engineering Dept.
• Physics Dept.. Mike Levine teaches courses in Computational Physics. See physics course list.
• Biology Dept., (look for "Computational" in course title). Faculty in computational biology & chemistry
• Dept. of Material Science and Eng.

Courses on Scientific Computing outside Carnegie Mellon University

• Indiana U's Introduction to Scientific Computing, undergrad course
• Stanford's CS 137, Introduction to Scientific Computing, undergrad, Chen Greif
• MIT's 18.337, Parallel Scientific Computing, grad, Alan Edelman, 1996 version
• U. of Utah's CS 5210, Advanced Methods in Scientific Computing I, Chris Johnson
• Sweden's Uppsala University, Department of Scientific Computing
• SUNY Brockport's CPS 101 Introduction to Computational Science, undergrad, web-based, Osman Yasar
• U. of Queensland's MN309, Advanced Numerical Analysis, Graeme Chandler, good book list
• U. of Maryland's MAPL/CMSC661 Scientific Computing II, Jian-Guo Liu, good book list
• U of California, Berkeley's Meshing and Triangulation in Graphics Engineering, and Modeling, Jonathan Shewchuk
• U of California, Irvine's Mesh Generation for Graphics and Scientific Computation, David Eppstein

Other Scientific Computing Info

• Scientific Computing & Numerical Methods, General
  • Numerical Analysis Digest, web-based newsletter, lots of info!, Finland mirror
  • Numerical Analysis & Associated Fields Resource Guide, Steve Sullivan, nice, big annotated book list
  • University of Utah Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute
  • Jim Demmel, UC Berkeley
  • Stanford's Scientific Computing / Computational Mathematics Program, Golub et al., courses and book list
  • MIT Fluid Dynamics Research Lab, Jaime Peraire et al. (aerodynamics)
  • Olivier Pironneau
  • Sweden's University of Linkoping Mathematics Resources, large list of links to software, other web pages
  • Scientific Computing World, SC business news, rather slick
  • German Scientific Computing Home Page
• Wavelets
  • Wavelets for Computer Graphics: A Primer, by Eric Stollnitz, Tony DeRose, and David Salesin (see also their book)
  • MathSoft's wavelet papers list
• Computational Geometry
  • The survey paper Mesh Generation, Marshall Bern and David Eppstein, Handbook of Computational Geometry, Elsevier, 2000, is available at Shewchuck's site (The copy I distributed in class 12/7, from Eppstein, seems to be older.)
  • David Eppstein's Geometry In Action (computational geometry applications) and Geometry Junkyard (computational geometry theory & exotica), excellent link collections
  • Computational Geometry Pages, Jeff Erickson, excellent link collection

15-859B, Introduction to Scientific Computing
Paul Heckbert, Nov. 2000