Mathematical Computation, Math 9171, Homework 1

The first homework will use snakify.org to give you an overview of the Python 3 programming language. Probably we won't use snakify after this.

1. Sign up for an account on snakify, using this link: snakify sign up. This identifies you as my student, by putting [email protected] as the teacher's email. Do this right away, so I can confirm that I can see your account well before the due date. It doesn't matter what e-mail address you give, so you can use an unimportant e-mail address if you want. But fill in your first name so I know who is who.

2. Read through the lessons and experiment with python.

3. The following questions will be graded. The number refers to the Section of the website that the problem is found in.

• 1. School desks
• 2. Bishop moves
• 3. Fractional part
• 3. First digit after decimal point
• 4. Adding factorials
• 5. Reverse the fragment
• 6. The index of a Fibonacci number
• 7. Queens
• 8. Fibonacci numbers. While the question says to use recursion, it's actually better to use a loop, so feel free to do so. If you know why it is better to use a loop, put a comment in your code explaining this.
• 9. Multiply two matrices
• 10. The number of distinct words in some text
• 11. Frequency analysis. Don't use the collections module, but do feel free to use the sorted function.

Note that it is not enough for your code to pass the tests given on snakify. For full marks, your solution must be correct, must be clearly written, and should not use library functions that have not been introduced.

There are many other online sources to help you learn python. Here are a few:

• How to think like a computer scientist, an interactive online textbook.
• Code Academy, a nice user interface, with more real interaction. Sign up at the start, or your progress may be lost. The examples are too easy, though.
• LearnPython.org, a quick overview, easy to skip to various topics. But most examples are done for you, so not interactive enough for my taste.