Programming in Mathematica

Description

In this course, we're going to teach you how to use the powerful graphics and animation tools available in Mathematica for prototyping ideas and visualizing data. 

While Mathematica has many built in functions for doing really amazing things, we feel that a good understanding of how to code frees you to be able to make just about anything. And so our focus in this course is programming using the Wolfram Language. To get you started off quickly, we will jump right in with plotting and animating, data and mathematical functions. After that, we will get into the nitty gritty details of programming with the Wolfram Language.

In each lecture, we will introduce new concepts, and demonstrate use cases with interesting examples. You can download the lecture notebook and follow along with us, as the best way to learn to program is to get as much practice as possible. Each lecture is also accompanied by an exercise notebook. These notebooks provide a bunch of problems for you to work on and will really help to internalize the new material. You will get the most out of this course if you do all of the exercises.

Periodically, we’ll have projects for you to work on. These project are often challenging and will test your ingenuity, but will also teach you how to program and solve real problems with Mathematica. Our projects include:

1. Programming and visualizing the oscillations of a simple pendulum
2. The evolution of cellular automata
3. Sierpinski’s carpet
4. Simple simulation of an evolution model

We feel that this course will best serve college level students, graduate students, and maybe even professors, since Mathematica is great for producing publication quality graphics. However, even if you are not an academic, you will benefit from taking this course.

We look forward to teaching this course and we hope you enjoy it. See you at the next lecture!

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