Doing Math With Python

This course’s goal is to bring together three topics near to my heart—programming, math, and science. What does that mean exactly? Within these pages, we’ll programmatically explore high school–level topics, like manipulating units of measurement; examining projectile motion; calculating mean, median, and mode; determining linear correlation; solving algebraic equations; describing the motion of a simple pendulum; simulating dice games; creating geometric shapes; and finding the limits, derivatives, and integrals of functions. These are familiar topics for many, but instead of using pen and paper, we’ll use our computer to explore them. We’ll write programs that will take numbers and formulas as input, do the tedious calculations needed, and then spit out the solution or draw a graph. Some of these programs are powerful calculators for solving math problems. They find the solutions to equations, calculate the correlation between sets of data, and determine the maximum value of a function, among other tasks. In other programs, we’ll simulate real-life events, such as projectile motion, a coin toss, or a die roll. Using programs to simulate such events gives us an easy way to analyze and learn more about them.

You’ll also find topics that would be extremely difficult to explore without programs. For example, drawing fractals by hand is tedious at best and close to impossible at worst. With a program, all we need to do is run a for loop with the relevant operation in the body of the loop.

I think you’ll find that this new context for “doing math” makes learning both programming and math more exciting, fun, and rewarding.

• Chapter 1, Working with Numbers, starts off with basic mathematical operations and gradually moves on to topics requiring a higher level of math know-how.

• Chapter 4, Algebra and Symbolic Math with SymPy, introduces symbolic math using the SymPy library. It begins with the basics of representing and manipulating algebraic expressions before introducing more complicated matters, such as solving equations.