Computational Methods for Material Science and Complex Systems

MSN 514 teaches you to simulate matter and complex behavior from the ground up: how to write code that captures atoms vibrating in a crystal, neurons spiking, populations evolving, or patterns self-organizing out of noise. Expect heavy hands-on work — six coding homeworks and a term project where you implement methods like molecular dynamics, DFT, Monte Carlo, reaction-diffusion, or genetic algorithms on a system of your choice. As a graduate elective it assumes you're comfortable with linear algebra, ODEs/PDEs, and a scripting language, and it's the practical bridge between the physics or materials theory you already know and actually computing predictions from it.