Software for the course

Python

Please use Python for computing in this class. If you don’t know Python but are used to Matlab, this Numpy for Matlab Users page might be very useful.

Some other resources:

To use Python effectively you will need numpy (which supports arrays and many mathematical operations), matplotlib (matlab-style plotting). The IPython shell and/or Jupyter notebooks are highly recommended for interactive work, see below.

The Anaconda Python Distribution is one easy way to get everything you need. If you install this, you can also then use the conda package installer to install various extensions easily.

You should install Python 2.7 (not 3.x) to be compatible with what is used in the notebooks posted for this this class.

Jupyter notebooks

See http://jupyter.org for more information and documentation.

The notebook platform is rapidly being improved but as a result how things behave often depend on what version you have installed. If you installed the Anaconda Python, you can insure you have jupyter and are up to date via the bash commands:

conda install jupyter
conda update jupyter

Then in a bash shell you should be able to execute:

jupyter notebook

to start the notebook server. You can then navigate your browser to the address shown when the notebook starts, e.g.

http://localhost:8888/tree

If you want to easily run notebooks without installing any software, you might try Using SageMathCloud.