What is computational physics? Here, we take it to mean techniques for simulating continuous physical systems on computers. Since mathematical physics expresses these systems as partial differential equations, an equivalent statement is that computational physics involves solving systems of partial differential equations on a computer. This book is meant to provide an introduction to computational physics to students in plasma physics and related disciplines. We present most of the basic concepts needed for numerical solution of partial differential equations. Besides numerical stability and accuracy, we go into many of the algorithms used today in enough depth to be able to analyze their stability, efficiency, and scaling properties. We attempt to.
