It’s sometimes odd to think of the ways that the eddies and currents buffet you around while reading on the Internet. Frequently, you encounter odd bits that resonate with stuff you have seen before. On such current lead me to return to a topic which I’ve dabbled in from time to time: gravitational n-body simulation.

Some of my first computer experiences were in solving versions of this problem, beginning perhaps with the classic lunar lander written in basic. I recall writing simple solar system simulators based upon the math presented in A.K. Dewdney’s Computer Recreations column in Scientific American in an article entitled A Cosmic Ballet, and later reprinted in his book The Armchair Universe. Later, when I gained some mathematical sophistication, I read about work by Carrier, Greengard and Rokhlin and Appel’s An Efficient Program for Many-Body Simulation” (I haven’t found a link online). Later, I would revisit this stuff when Pat Hanrahan introduced fast hierarchal radiosity.

Today’s surfing lead me to a website I hadn’t seen before. The Art of Computational Science visits this stuff for me again, but in a way that is actually designed to help you learn about how to write code to do this kind of stuff. Pretty neat.

[tags]Computational Science,N-body simulation[/tags]