Mathematical Computation, Math 9171, Lecture 1 info

For the first two or three classes, we'll use snakify.org to give you an overview of the Python 3 programming language. It's an easy way to get going quickly. It's free, and there is nothing to install, as it runs in your browser.

1. Sign up for an account on snakify. It doesn't matter what e-mail address you give, so you can use an unimportant e-mail address if you want.

2. Read through lessons 1-11 and do lots of the exercises. Here are some that I recommend. The number refers to the Section of the website that the problem is found in.

• 1. School desks
• 2. Fractional part
• 2. First digit after decimal point
• 3. Bishop moves
• 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. Do you know why it is better to use a loop?
• 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.

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.