This course takes advantage of the many cases in which the physical question and its algorithmic solution are intimately linked, so the physics and the algorithm illuminate each other. Because it exploits this link to the fullest, the course has only one prerequisite physics course, and thus will be taken by students as early as their freshman year. A. Current Situation Oberlin College offers the standard sort of graduate school preparation curriculum that can be found at any top-notch college or university. Students must labor through four hard years before they begin to see current research applications in their formal course work.
Many students drop out along the way.
The standard curriculum solidified before the advent of the computer, so this most practical of physics tools is largely ignored. At Oberlin, for example, physics majors are urged to learn a computer language, yet most of those who do so apply this knowledge only to one or two relaxation problems that might or might not be assigned in the electrodynamics course. The curriculum tends to produce graduates who manipulate symbols rather than understand physics. This proposal is an attempt in the direction of rectifying the faults while retaining the manifold and obvious benefits of the standard curriculum. Because this course comes so late in the curriculum, it gives the impression that numerical methods are second-rate and are to be used only when analytic methods fail.