I'm a physics professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (https://rfisher.sites.umassd.edu/). I do computational astrophysics, with a particular focus on multidimensional hydrodynamical and magnetohydrodynamical simulations, combustion, and thermonuclear transients. This repository is a collection of my public work, including:

• Code snippets and scripts from my research, particularly related to the FLASH code (such as FLASH-X Docker, https://github.com/rtfisher/flashx_docker) and SNID Docker (https://github.com/rtfisher/snid_docker)
• Research lecture notes, such as from a summer school at ICESUN in Yunnan Province, China https://github.com/rtfisher/summerschool_lectures.
• Visualizations used in my classes --
  • My sophomore-level astrophysics class for physics majors and interested non-majors: Kepler's laws (https://github.com/rtfisher/keplers_laws_animation), conic sections (https://github.com/rtfisher/conic_sections_visualization), exoplanet transit visualizer (https://github.com/rtfisher/exoplanet-transit-visualization), and the expansion of the universe via the Friedmann equation (https://github.com/rtfisher/cosmology-visualization)
  • My sophomore-level modern physics class: the Galilean and Lorentz transformations (https://github.com/rtfisher/galilean_lorentz_visualizations), the photoelectric effect (https://github.com/rtfisher/photoelectric-animation), and Compton scattering (https://github.com/rtfisher/compton_scattering)
  • My junior-level undergraduate physics major classical mechanics class, illustrating forced, damped, harmonic and anharmonic oscillators (https://github.com/rtfisher/forced_damped_oscillator), normal modes of coupled harmonic oscillators (https://github.com/rtfisher/normal_modes), the restricted three body problem (https://github.com/rtfisher/circular_restricted_three_body_problem), torque-free rotation of a rigid body (https://github.com/rtfisher/torque-free-rigid-rotation), and the Poinsot ellipsoid construction for rotating bodies (https://github.com/rtfisher/poinsot_ellipsoids).
• Anything else I'm excited to share -- including a grant budget calculator (https://github.com/rtfisher/grant-budget-calculator), or a Python script which reads PDFs of student transcripts and streamlines the degree certification process (https://github.com/rtfisher/degree-certify). Not astrophysical but very convenient time savers!

Feel free to poke around and see what's new. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out!

Bob

Continuing a legacy that traces back through Lyman Spitzer, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, and Carl Friedrich Gauss

"We are all made of star stuff" – and stellar explosions! ✨