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title: Playing with Computational Physics
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Introduction
------------

At some point during the process of working through my dissertation, I
got so bogged down in the process of *doing* the work, I forgot a bit
*why* I was so intrigued when I started.  I was going through the
motions, but not really finding the fun of physics.  Sure, programming
is fun in and of itself, but I was missing the physics.  So, now that I
have free time to pursue a hobby, I want to go back and remind myself
why I started down this path.

So, where to go?  I am one of those people who value a good book.  And I
do mean a physical book.  I bought and kept all of my text books
throughout my undergrad and graduate work.  That being the case, I
grabbed my undergraduate computational physics book by Nicholas J.
Giordano and Hisao Nakanishi [1] and decided to work through it again.
It is a fantastic book that covers a broad span of topics with many fun
problems that I can play with.

With that all said, I plan on working through all of the problems
starting at the beginning.  I will periodically post a selection of the
discussion of the solutions here, but some problems are trivial and
don't merit much in the way of discussion.  I will be working with
Python primarily, but I may dust of my Fortran skills for some of the
problems.  The code will be hosted in a [mercurial repository on
Bitbucket](repo).  Why Bitbucket and mercurial you ask?  Because it's
Python.

And now for a final note before I get started.  If you are an
undergraduate using this text, go do your homework before looking over
my solutions.  It's good for you and actually quite fun.

Chapter 1
---------

And so it begins.  This will probably be a very short section because
the problems are very simple.  The chapter is simply a chance to whet
the appetite and brush up on some basics.

References
----------

1.  N. J. Giordano and H. Nakanishi, *Computational Physics* (Pearson,
    Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2006), Ed. 2.

[repo]: https://bitbucket.org/kprussing/compphys

Add introduction to comp phys post
Add introduction to comp phys post

I still think this should be a separate top level with each chapter
getting a page.  I just don't feel like figuring out how to get Jekyll
to do the right thing.
