Syllabus. Office hour is Fridays 11-12.

Instructions for final presentations

Lecture materials:

Lecture 1 slides: course intro and galaxy phenomenology

Slides on surface brightness profiles and N-body simulations

An interactive Barnes-Hut tree

Paper on energy-conserving adaptive gravitational softening: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007MNRAS.374.1347P

Paper on softening as a smoothing operation: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012MNRAS.425.1104B

GADGET-2 (TreePM) code paper (including section 5 on parallelization strategies): http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005MNRAS.364.1105S

Code paper for the moving-mesh hydro code Arepo: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010MNRAS.401..791S

GIZMO code paper, describing new Godunov-based meshless methods (also contains a useful summary of other hydro algorithms): http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014arXiv1409.7395H

Our treatment of the Boltzmann and Jeans equations will closely follow Paul Schechter’s lecture notes, available at http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-902-astrophysics-ii-fall-2004/lecture-notes

Problem sets: (links removed)

Problem set 1, due Oct. 14.

Problem set 2, due Oct. 28.

Problem set 3, due Nov. 11.

Problem set 4, due Nov. 25.