HARMONIC OSCILLATION

Derivations and Applications

INTRODUCTION

This page is the official home of a document entitled "Harmonic Oscillation:
Derivations and Applications".

I welcome links to this page, but please do not link to any file on this
page.  The document file name includes a version number, and each time I modify
the document (correction of errors, etc), this version number part of the file
name will be changed.

DOCUMENT DOWNLOAD

The document is in Adobe PDF format, which requires that you have Adobe Reader
installed on your computer.  Please RIGHT-click on the PDF link and select 
"Save Target As..." so that you download the PDF file to your computer.  This 
will enable you to view the document conveniently in the future.  (However, I
invite you to check back for updated versions.)

SOURCE CODE DOWNLOAD

I am making this source code (with project files) available only to give 
readers of the "Harmonic Oscillation" article some idea about how one might
implement some of the ideas in C/C++ code.  I recommend against using my code,
which may contain mathematical errors, but I still think there is enough value
to inspire readers to try out their own experiments.

I wrote the following program to generate tables of data for various graphs
featured in the "Harmonic Oscillation" article.  I executed the program from a
command prompt, directing the plain text output to plain text files.  Then I
simply opened the text file with Microsoft Excel, highlighted columns, and
created charts.  The only purpose of the program was to generate data for 
these charts, so there are many hard-coded constants (confined to 
demonstration functions).

I believe the code will compile under Linux, but the supplied project file is
for Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0.  Just double-click on the DSW file, hit 
Control-F5, and you should see a meaningless stream of numbers flow in a
console window.  Use the command prompt to go to the directory containing the
compiled executable, and type:

         simple_harmonic_oscillator.exe  >  out.txt

This will pipe the output in to the text file named "out.txt".  Then open
Excel, if you have it, and just highlight the columns with numbers, insert a
chart (an "X,Y" type), and you should see one of the charts in my article.  You
can edit the function that calls the various demonstration functions, and thus
print out data for my other charts.  Under Linux you might use gnuplot.  I 
commented out some hacks that I used to artificially separate sequences of
curves, you can reproduce something a little more like my charts if you 
un-comment various parts.

Anyhow, I feel really bad about the code.  There are some hard-core hacks in
there to help me generate weird data for charts.  One of my future projects
will use a form of this code, so I will eventually release a more 
comprehensive, proper program.

CONTACT INFORMATION
Colin P. Fahey
Irvine, California; USA
cpfahey@earthlink.net
http://www.colinfahey.com