One of the courses offered during physics honours at the university of Newcastle is called “Numerical Techniques in Physics” or something of that ilk. It’s a great course which covered a new topic every week with an associated assignment for which we coded solutions in Matlab. I put a fair amount of time into these assignments that really should have gone into my thesis so I thought I might share a selection.

Differential Equations was to give a simple outline of using matrix methods to solve discretised differential equations, in this case a couple of heat diffusion equations. In another assignment we had to discretise the differential operator to find the eigenfunctions of the one dimensional wave equation for varying conditions. One of the later subjects in the course was finite difference time domain simulations which are memorable for the chaos that can arise whenever you make your time step too large, violating the CFL condition. The associated assignment was to perform FDTD calculations for an EM wave in a variety of mediums.

The culmination of the course was to solve a problem of your own choice with some of the techniques learnt throughout the course, but importantly to extend those techniques and aim to impress. My major assignment was to produce an FDTD simulation of the wave equation in a wooden bar well enough to reproduce the sound of a Marimba and play some music. The choice of ‘flight of the bumblebee’ makes the simulation sound strange due to the cut-off short notes which don’t have some proper muting applied but overall the timbre of my virtual instrument ended up being better than I hoped it would be.