Return to the course home page.

What:

At the Physics Department's request, I have prepared some iPython notebooks that are designed to illustrate how Python can be used to study the behavior of physical systems and solve some problems that are intractable with analytical (pencil-and-paper) methods.

Because they are new this semester, these modules will not be a formal part of the course. We are using you as our "beta testers" of the material. We hope that you will work through the notebooks and provide us with feedback to help us improve the presentation and content, for use in next semester's courses.

Please keep in mind that this is not a programming course. It is intended to teach you only enough programming to show you how it can be a useful tool. All the notebooks already contain working programs, which you can modify (e.g., change parameters) to study their behavior.

Purpose:

Two major goals:

• Python is a real-world (for example, object-oriented) programming language so the knowledge that you gain here will, we hope, be useful in the real world (that is, after you graduate). Once you know one programming language, others are much easier to learn.

• We hope that you will begin to see some of the ways that computer tools (numerical and graphical analysis) can help to solve problems and to study the behavior of physical stystems.

Some practical information:

• Here is a link to the P435 iPython web page. You will log in with your usual UIUC credentials.

• You will be presented with a web page that contains one useful link: "P435-bootstrap.ipynb". Clicking on this link will open an iPython notebook that will tell you how to load the course-specific notebooks.

• After loading the P435 notebooks, "Close and Halt" (a menu item) the bootstrap. You will see that a new folder, named "P435" has been created. It contains your personal copy of the course material Ð you may edit the files without interfering with other students' work.

• The P435 folder contains a README file that (at this time) contains very little information, besides a suggested order of notebook execution. I hope that you will tell me what it should contain.

• You should start with the Introduction.ipynb notebook. It contains a lot of information about how to use iPython and (for those of you who are unfamiliar) some basics of the Python language.

Return to the course home page.