“There are no secrets to success: don’t waste time looking for them. Success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty to those for whom you work, and persistence.” ~Colin Powell
You can do anything you put your mind into!
Here’s a couple of interesting videos I’ve watched recently:
If you liked this video, I suggest you read the book “Turing’s Cathedral”. Check the review.
until next time…
Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe
by George Dyson
Pantheon (2012-03-01)
9780375422775
Amazon.com link
goodreads link
I was drawn to this book by its title & cover design. “Turing” in the title plus the punched cover directly meant (at least in my own mind) that it was about Alan Turing and the Universal machine.
Before this book I knew little about Turing’s universal machine and the origins of the computer. I knew about Von Neumann only by the name.
After reading this book, I got more interested about computers. I now have an awareness about how powerful the computer is (especially in our times) and how inefficient we (or at least me) are using it. Now I know the origins of the ENIAC, MANIAC & their derivatives. Know I know what an “app” was like in the 1950’s.
Turing’s Cathedral (still not sure why “Cathedral”!; maybe referring to the computer as the cathedral?) is an exciting read especially for the computer enthusiast, mathematicians, physicists, and scientists in general. It is eloquently written and describes things in details.
What I liked most about it is that it has references to actual scientific papers written the creators of the computer. As a matter of fact I have selected a couple of papers too read.
I finished the book without even knowing it. It suddenly stops without prior notice, as if there is a continuation that has been cut.
I really enjoyed reading this book and recommend it for everyone, literally everyone.
In the previous blog post What is Computational Physics (Science)?, I ended the post with the following figure
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| Graph of the probability distribution of the 100th state of the quantum harmonic oscillator (generated using the power series method). |
and stated that I might write a post on how to solve the Quantum harmonic oscillator numerically using the power series method (the other method being the ladder operator method [1]) and generate that figure. This post is just about that.
Ok. First I need to clear the cache with the restart command, import the PDEtools (to solve the pde SE) and Maplets[Elements] (necessary if you want to generate a maplet with a slider) packages.
restart; with(PDEtools): #we need to use the dchange command later in the solution with(Maplets[Elements]):
Ibrahim El Merehbi 
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