[Geophysics] MATLAB in geophysics?

[Seth Stein]

Jackie,

You're raising one of the toughest questions (in my view) in teaching 
geophysics: what computational tools make sense. I've thought about this 
and discussed it with colleagues both here and elsewhere, and find no 
general agreement.

So far I've confronted this issue mostly at the advanced undergrad/intro 
grad level in the courses that go into the Stein & Wysession text 
(Seismology, Tectonophysics, Signal Processing/Inverse Problems). In 
these I assign a fair number of the computer problems from the book, and 
give students the choice of how to do them. I encourage them to write 
fortran programs, but point out that all could be done in Matlab and 
most in Excel. At this level I encourage them to learn to program if 
they don't yet, and a lot of them do so. Fortran turns out (no surprise) 
much easier for this that C++.

The trickier issue is what to do at a lower level. I'm writing lectures
now for a new data analysis class that's intended to be at a 
sophomore/junior level, with no prerequisites beyond calculus (and one 
could pretty much get by w/o that). It's supposed to be analogous to 
what a lot of physics departments do early in their students' undergrad 
careers. I've been mulling over what to do about computation, and am 
going to try just using Excel. Although kludgy, it does have a fair 
amount of math/stat functions available, and I suspect most students 
have it and so don't need to buy anything. So far I've written lab/demos 
for earthquake recurrence and probability, and least square fits to data 
(I'll probably use ages on the Hawaiian chain).

If this works, I plan to start using similar problems in my sophomore 
intro geophysics class.

Seth Stein

My approach has been to assign

   Caplan-Auerbach wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> I'm a geophysicist who was unfortunately unable to attend the NAGT 
> workshop this summer (fieldwork got in the way), so I didn't have the 
> opportunity to ask this question to everyone at that time.  Hopefully 
> it's okay to use this listserv to do so now. 
> 
> I'm very curious whether other geophysics faculty are using MATLAB or 
> other similar software in their undergraduate classes.  I teach at a 
> university that is primary undergraduate, although we have a strong 
> master's program in geology.  Our undergraduate students largely become 
> licensed geologists or work in industry following graduation, although 
> some do go on to graduate school.  Although our strengths have 
> traditionally been in field geology we're working very hard to develop 
> our geophysics and engineering geology.  However, there's no question 
> that our students lack confidence and skill in quantitative areas. 
> 
> I'm a user of MATLAB, and have always wanted my students to have some 
> familarity with it.   I know that it can be very helpful to those who go 
> on to graduate school, and I suspect that at least some will see it in 
> industry (although I'm not sure).  It also helps those students who want 
> to do research with me (graduate or senior thesis), since all of my 
> research is MATLAB based.  However, they really struggle with it, and I 
> wonder if I'm beating my head against a wall for no reason.  Another 
> member of our faculty is a user of MathCAD, which the students love, but 
> I'm not aware that it gets much use elsewhere. 
> 
> I'd be very interested in learning what other schools are doing.  Do you 
> use any software for quantitative analysis?  Excel?  Mathematica?  
> MATLAB?  MatCAD?  Do you introduce it on the undergraduate level?  On 
> the graduate level?  Do you use it in the classroom, or just for 
> research?  Do other departments in your university use this software?  
> Does anyone know how widely these software packages are used outside of 
> academia or research?
> 
> Any thoughts would help enormously.
> 
> Aloha and thanks in advance,
> Jackie
> 


-- 
Seth Stein
William Deering Professor
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
1850 Campus Drive
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208
(847) 491-5265 FAX: (847) 491-8060 E-MAIL: seth at earth.northwestern.edu
http://www.earth.northwestern.edu/people/seth