In 1999, when we started teaching this course at the Department of Physics in Oslo, Compu￾tational Physics and Computational Science in general were still perceived by the majority of
physicists and scientists as topics dealing with just mere tools and number crunching, and not as
subjects of their own. The computational background of most students enlisting for the course
on computational physics could span from dedicated hackers and computer freaks to people who
basically had never used a PC. The majority of graduate students had a very rudimentary knowl￾edge of computational techniques and methods. Four years later most students have had a fairly
uniform introduction to computers, basic programming skills and use of numerical exercises in
undergraduate courses. Practically every undergraduate student in physics has now made a Mat￾lab or Maple simulation of e.g., the pendulum, with or without chaotic motion. These exercises
underscore the importance of simulations as a means to gain novel insights into physical sys￾tems, especially for those cases where no analytical solutions can be found or an experiment
is to complicated or expensive to carry out. Thus, computer simulations are nowadays an inte￾gral part of contemporary basic and applied research in the physical sciences. Computation is
becoming as important as theory and experiment. We could even strengthen this statement by
saying that computational physics, theoretical physics and experimental are all equally important
in our daily research and studies of physical systems. Physics is nowadays the unity of theory,
experiment and computation. The ability "to compute" is now part of the essential repertoire of
research scientists. Several new fields have emerged and strengthened their positions in the last
years, such as computational materials science, bioinformatics, computational mathematics and
mechanics, computational chemistry and physics and so forth, just to mention a few. To be able
to e.g., simulate quantal systems will be of great importance for future directions in fields like
materials science and nanotechonology