Is Data Structures and Algorithms Worthwhile for Computational Physics Majors?

[darkchild]

My field of interest is computational physics and computational math. I'm planning my courses for next term and I wanted to know if anyone knowledgeable in the area of scientific computing or just experienced with a lot of programming for math applications thought a course called Data Structures and Algorithms would be worth my time. Here is the course description:

Definition, design, implementation of abstract data structures, including stacks, queues, generalized lists; implementation as contiguous or linked structures. Structures include tables and hashing, trees, graphs. Algorithms for manipulating structures, searching, sorting; introduction to the analysis of these algorithms.

Thanks.

 

[Coin]

The course you're describing is one which is fairly essential if you are ever going to be doing large programming projects. It might be that you could technically get by in computational physics/math without knowing this material-- as far as I know there are people who are legitimately doing "computational physics" but never leave MATLAB :) -- but if you're ever going to find yourself needing to write a "traditional" computer program, and I imagine at some point you will, then I think it would very much help you to take a class of this kind.