Title: Mathematica and Materials Chemistry: Bridging the gap between theorists and experimentalists
Speaker: Prof.Michael D. Barnes
Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Physics (Adjunct)
Chemistry Department Graduate Program Director
University of Massachusetts Amherst
179 Physical Sciences Bldg. Amherst, MA 01003
For the past 6 years, Pro. Mike Barnes has been exploring ways to employ the desktop computational platform Mathematica as a way to help students (both at the undergraduate and graduate level) in the physical sciences to be more quantitative and analytical in their science. In many areas of chemistry research, one encounters problems in advanced statistics and hypothesis/model testing, kinetic modeling and reaction mechanism validation (as two obvious examples) whose solutions often require a high level of expertise and training in applied mathematics. His experience with teaching undergraduate physical chemistry over the past 20 years has shown that integration of conceptual material with the powerful visualization and computational tools available through Mathematica leads to significantly enhanced learning, and the goal with this project is expose students with broad and scientifically diverse backgrounds to applied math methods (in a single semester course) which would otherwise require years of advanced training. In this talk, he’ll use some examples from my class which involve real-life current research in mass-spectrometry, single-molecule peptide translocation, and kinetic modeling to illustrate his class motto: “You don’t have to be a math expert to do some very sophisticated math things”.
