Introduction to Python for Physicists
Abstract:
The goal of my lectures it to teach physik-students on the master and PhD level how to efficiently and flexibly solve programming problems with the easy-to-learn, high-level programming language Python.
In the past decade, Python has become the 'Lingua Franca' for computer programming in many scientific domains, e.g. physics & astronomy. As a script language it allows us the powerful combination of interactive development and writing programs (scripts) for the later 'mass production' of scientific results. Very powerful and rich scientific libraries often give the script language similar processing speed to compiled languages such as C or Fortran.
Based on programming knowledge from a traditional scientific language such as C, Fortran or Java I will first outline major differences of Python to those languages. I will then focus on the Python-usage in scientific environments, introduce necessary data-structures (numpy-arrays) and present the structure of major scientific libraries (the scipy-module).
The entire course will be hands-on with each student working and performing practical exercises on an own computer.
Topics covered in the course:
- Introduction to Python based on solid prior programming experience
- Introduction to numpy-arrays (primary Python-data structure for scientific computing)
- Introduction to the scientific-python modules (scipy)
- Interactive work / development with Python
- Plotting with python (the matplotlib module)
If time permits I will also cover the following topics:
- An introduction to collaborative software-development/version control (github)
- Symbolic mathematics in Python (the sympy-module). Symbolic mathematics is what programs such as Mathematica or Maple are doing.