I have now read the first half of Binney and Tremaine.  Today's main topic was the stability of self-gravitating systems of particles.  As of the late 1980's the purely analytical methods for determining stability were clever, but not very applicable to real galaxies.  At least one of the "laws" described in the text was known to not agree with numerical simulations of N-body systems.

I'm considering the possibility of using Python along with either C++ or Fortran when I write the programs this summer and fall.  Python is very powerful and essentially platform-neutral.  It's supposedly easy to learn, and it has a huge library.  There is even a module called Pyfits that enables FITS file manipulation.  I've seen people use  Python very effectively in data visualization, of course it requires finding the right software for the visualzation task at hand.  Python just serves as the glue that holds the main structure together.  I'll have to ask Andrew Corrigan more about this since he's an expert.  That reminds me:  I need to find out what people are working on in some of the other departments at UCR.

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