Lectures

Lecture 01. [Introduction and Overview]
Lecture 02. [Sorting & Least Square Fit]

Codes

Code 1: Hello World.
Code 2: Area and Volume.
Code 3: Roots of Quadratic equation.
Code 4: List Comprehension.
Code 5: Bubble & Insertion Sorting.
Code 6: Mean, Median and Mode.
Code 7: Factorial and Series Sum.
Code 8: Matrix Addition, Substraction, Multiplication.
Code 9: Least Square Fit, with input file .
Code 10: A.P. & G.P. (Miscellaneous)

Remarks

Download from here:
- Gnuplot (32-bit) and Gnuplot (64-bit).
- Python 2.7.15 (32-bit) and Python 2.7.15 (64-bit).
- Octave (32-bit) and Octave (64bit).

Study Materials

Gnuplot in Action understanding data and Graphs - Phillipp K. Janert.
Scientific Computing in Python - Abhijit Kar Gupta.
Physics in Laboratory including python Programming (Semester I) - Mandal, Chowdhury, Das, Das.
Introduction to Numerical Analysis - S.S. Sastry.
Numerical Methods - Arun Kr Jalan & Utpal Sarkar.
Numerical Mathematical Analysis - J. B. Scarborough.
Elementary Numerical Analysis - K.E. Atkinson.
An Introduction to computational Physics - T.Pang.
Learning with Python-how to think like a computer scientist - J. Elkner, C. Meyer, and A. Downey.
Gnuplot 5 - Lee Phillips.
Python Programming - Satyanarayana, Radhika Mani, Jagdesh.
Python 2.1 Bible - Dave Brueck, Stephen Tanner.
Computatioal Physics problem solving with Computers - Landau, Paez, Bordeianu.

Topics

Introduction to programming in python:
- Introduction:
  - Using the python interpreter as a calculator.
  - Variable and data types (int, float, complex, list, tuple, string, the type() function).
  - Basic mathematical operations.
  - Compound statements in python:
    - Conditionals: if: elif: else:
    - Loops for:, while:
    - User defined functions def: [return statement, default values for arguments, keyword arguments]
  - Importing modules with math and cmath as examples.
  - Using online help.
  - Basic idea of namespaces-local and global.
  - Python scripts, I/O operations (including opening and writing to files).
- The python iterables data type:
  - List:
    - Defining lists,reading and changing elements from lists, slicing (with discussion on the difference between ll=mm and ll=mm[:], concatenation, list comprehension.
    - built in functions involving lists: range(), len(), sum(), min(), max().
    - list methods: append(), extend(), count(), index(), sort(), insert(), pop(), remove(), reverse().
  - Tuples: Contrast and compare with lists, packing/unpacking using tuples (including a,b=b,a to swap variables).
  - Strings: defining strings, the use of single, double or triple quotes as string delimiters, len(), indexing, slicing, string concatanation, some string methods: strip(), split(), join(), find(), count(), replace(), string formatting in python (using the % operator).
- Problems and applications:
  - Problem 0: Observe and interpret the result of the following two scripts
    - i=0; a=1; while a>0: i=i+1; a=a/2; print i;
    - i=0; a=1; b=1; while a+b>b: i=i+1; a=a/2; print i;
  - Problem 1: Root finding for a single variable (basic theory and algorithm).
    - Bisection method.
    - Newton-Raphson Method.
  - Problem 2: Sorting of lists (algorithm, flowchart and code).
    - Bubble sort.
    - Selection sort.
  - Problem 3: ODE in one and two dimensions using Euler algorithm (output to be saved in data files and gunuplot to be used to plot graphs).
    - Capacitor charging/discharging.
    - Simulating a half-wave rectifier with a capacitor filter.
    - Particle dynamics in 1D.
  - Problem 4: Matrix operations using list of lists.
    - Matrix Addition.
    - Matrix Multiplication.
    - Transpose of a Matrix.