The Fermi–Pasta–Ulam ‘numerical experiment’: history and pedagogical perspectives

Abstract

The Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) pioneering numerical experiment played a major role in the history of computer simulation because it introduced this concept for the first time. Moreover, it raised a puzzling question which was answered more than 10 years later. After an introduction to this problem, we briefly review its history and then suggest some simple numerical experiments, with a provided Matlab code, to study various aspects of the ``FPU'' problem.