Bowling Green State University

Paul F. Endres

Spring Semester, January 2001

Brief Course Description:

• Chem 402 is a survey of many different ways computers are used by chemists.
  • As a survey it samples 10-15 different types of computer applications.
  • Clearly, we don't spend much more than 1 week on each category.
    • You won't become an expert in any area from this course
  • The course covers several different types of computer systems ranging from
    • the omnipresent desktop PC's
    • to smaller hand held units
    • down to microprocessor chips
    • to laboratory instruments with embedded computers
    • then up to larger work stations, especially those with powerful graphics
    • to mainframe computers
    • and on to supercomputers.
  • We will also look at several languages and several specific programming environments.
    MathCAD and Mathematica are powerful mathematical tools
    • LabView is a great way to handle computer/instrument interfacing
    • Visual Basic is a good general purpose programming language
    • FORTRAN is still, after nearly 30 years, the language of choice for "number crunching"
  • In the laboratory environment, computer control and data acquisition are important topics
    • The are some hardware issues: how we connect computers to sensors
    • Ways computers can control equipment and run experiments
    • Beyond that we need to explore way to minimize noise and improve the quality of data
    • Ways to transfer data between programs
    • Ways to effectively present data (usually graphically)
  • There are some very important numerical tools that should be part of our arsenal of tools
    • Statistical methods
    • Curve fitting
    • Simulation Methods
    • Dealing with Differential Equations
  • We also want to briefly examine a few big time applications like
    • Molecular Computation and Molecular Imaging.
    • Spectroscopic Simulations
  • We also need to spend a little time on Internet topics
    • Specifically, look at the language of Web pages (html)

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  For this to be possible we rely on a combination of methods
  • Some of the course is on-line and contains exercises to acquaint you with topics and tools of the trade
  • We have some lecture, generally in an area with many computers so you can listen, work the computer fdirectly, and observe.
  • Most assignments are of the form where you work with detailed directions and observe results, rahter than traditinal problem solving approaches.
    • We've got to be realistic if we want to cover this much territory in one course
  • You'll also get a chance to work on 3-4 different computer systems.
  mailto:endres@bgnet.bgsu.edu

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  Index

  • course syllabus (January 19, 1997)
  • course assignments
  • curve fitting tutorial
  • signal conditioning tutorial
  • solving ordinary differential equations
  • solving partial differntial equations
  • graphics
  • endres home page

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  Chemistry 402 Syllabus

  (syllabus is not available) return to index

  return to home page