June 2025 · Reading group
Summer Book Club 2025
This summer we're reading LeVeque's Finite Difference Methods for Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations.
Last summer, Kyra Ruiz, Antonia Peters and I read Acheson’s Elementary Fluid Dynamics. This year’s book is Randall J. LeVeque’s Finite Difference Methods for Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations: Steady-State and Time-Dependent Problems (SIAM, 2007): practical, but with enough proof to see why the methods converge.
What we’re reading: chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, 9 and 11, focusing on numerical methods for PDEs.
How it works:
- Discussions are informal: what we did, what was confusing, what was interesting.
- Everyone who comes, me included, picks up homework from the book’s exercises, depending on interest.
- Last year we each presented an attempt at one question per meeting. This year the aim is lower pressure: thinking problems through, not getting perfect answers.
Meeting dates are in the reading plan linked above.