Teaching numerics with Python

[Des Small]

Antti Rasila <arasila at pcu.helsinki.fi.invalid> writes:


> 1) ..someone has experience on this kind of usage of Python numerical
> mathematics? We would be happy to hear from your experiences.

I work as a Scientific Programmer in a University maths department,
and Python is my main language.  The advantages for me are essentially
those you note:

* short development times 
* interactive code development (I can't work without this, anymore)
* it's not FORTRAN
* convenient bindings to Tk for guis, VTK for 3D visualisation stuff
(typically both get used together).
* it's not C++
* Numeric extensions have much of the power attributed to MATLAB
for array-bashing 
* it's a Real Language 
* you can recode bottlenecks in C if the mood takes you (it usually
doesn't in my case, but that's because I care more about my time than
the computer's)

Plus you can get people from a FORTRAN background to try it (if this
wasn't a constraint I might have gone with Lisp) although I'd prefer
not to look at any more of the resulting code.

> 2) ..if some course material and ready program files are available,
> which we could use as building blocks of our course?

We don't have any.  I don't teach, but the computing curriculum here
is being reconsidered, and it may be that Python figures in
undergraduate life in the future, so I'd be interested in this too.

How you teach this stuff probably depends on whether you can assume
prior knowledge of programming in general.

> 3) ..you have seen a book such as Scientific Computing with Python

No, but if someone writes one, I'll buy it.

> Links:
> 
> Spring 2002 course homepage:
> http://www.math.helsinki.fi/~arasila/nrc02/

Des
-- 
Des Small, Scientific Programmer,
School of Mathematics, University of Bristol, UK.