Fall, 2021
Welcome to Scientific Computing for the fall term, 2021! We are going to have fun and you will learn a lot about how to write code to accomplish useful tasks in your own research.
We will be using MATLAB in the course this year. It is a high level language that is very similar to Python, R, Julia, and others you may have come across. Once you learn to program in one high-level language it is not difficult to learn a second or a third language. They all share the same basic idioms, it’s just the names of things, and the syntax, which is different.
I may demonstrate some concepts using Python in addition to MATLAB, and I may post sample code in Python alongside MATLAB as well.
Western has a site license for MATLAB which means it is free for you to install and use. Here is the relevant web page that you should go to in order to get started with downloading and installing MATLAB on your own machine: Western University MathWorks Campus Agreement.
MATLAB has extensive help and documentation online, with lots of example code and some tutorials. Here is the MATLAB Help Center, which is the starting point in to all of the documentation.
If you have a strong desire and a good reason to use Python (or another language) instead of MATLAB, then I will allow you to submit assignments in another language instead of MATLAB.
This is a graduate course, so progressing through the material will depend on you taking the initiative to complete the readings, play with the practice coding exercises, and complete the assignments on time. You should consider the course materials as a map—pointers to resources to help you learn to write programs to solve problems—and me as your tour guide, pointing you in the directions of interesting things to go and learn about. Have fun!
If you are interested in Python, check out the 2020 version of this course which was aimed at learning to code using Python.
There is no homework assignment handed out this week. The first weekly assignment is posted for next week (week 1) and is due one week later (week 2).