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Über dieses Buch

This book presents computer programming as a key method for solving mathematical problems. There are two versions of the book, one for MATLAB and one for Python. The book was inspired by the Springer book TCSE 6: A Primer on Scientific Programming with Python (by Langtangen), but the style is more accessible and concise, in keeping with the needs of engineering students. The book outlines the shortest possible path from no previous experience with programming to a set of skills that allows the students to write simple programs for solving common mathematical problems with numerical methods in engineering and science courses. The emphasis is on generic algorithms, clean design of programs, use of functions, and automatic tests for verification.

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Inhaltsverzeichnis

Open Access

1. The First Few Steps

Today, most people are experienced with computer programs, typically programs such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer, and Photoshop. The interaction with such programs is usually quite simple and intuitive: you click on buttons, pull down menus and select operations, drag visual elements into locations, and so forth. The possible operations you can do in these programs can be combined in seemingly an infinite number of ways, only limited by your creativity and imagination.
Nevertheless, programs often make us frustrated when they cannot do what we wish. One typical situation might be the following. Say you have some measurements from a device, and the data are stored in a file with a specific format. You may want to analyze these data in Excel and make some graphics out of it. However, assume there is no menu in Excel that allows you to import data in this specific format. Excel can work with many different data formats, but not this one. You start searching for alternatives to Excel that can do the same and read this type of data files. Maybe you cannot find any ready-made program directly applicable. You have reached the point where knowing how to write programs on your own would be of great help to you! With some programming skills, you may write your own little program which can translate one data format to another. With that little piece of tailored code, your data may be read and analyzed, perhaps in Excel, or perhaps by a new program tailored to the computations that the measurement data demand.
Svein Linge, Hans Petter Langtangen

Open Access

2. Basic Constructions

Very often in life, and in computer programs, the next action depends on the outcome of a question starting with ‘‘if’’. This gives the possibility to branch into different types of action depending on some criterion. Let us as usual focus on a specific example, which is the core of so-called random walk algorithms used in a wide range of branches in science and engineering, including materials manufacturing and brain research. The action is to move randomly to the north (N), east (E), south (S), or west (W) with the same probability. How can we implement such an action in life and in a computer program?
We need to randomly draw one out of four numbers to select the direction in which to move. A deck of cards can be used in practice for this purpose. Let the four suits correspond to the four directions: clubs to N, diamonds to E, hearts to S, and spades to W, for instance. We draw a card, perform the corresponding move, and repeat the process a large number of times. The resulting path is a typical realization of the path of a diffusing molecule.
Svein Linge, Hans Petter Langtangen

Open Access

3. Computing Integrals

We now turn our attention to solving mathematical problems through computer programming. There are many reasons to choose integration as our first application. Integration is well known already from high school mathematics. Most integrals are not tractable by pen and paper, and a computerized solution approach is both very much simpler and much more powerful – you can essentially treat all integrals $$\int_{a}^{b}f(x)dx$$ in 10 lines of computer code (!). Integration also demonstrates the difference between exact mathematics by pen and paper and numerical mathematics on a computer. The latter approaches the result of the former without any worries about rounding errors due to finite precision arithmetics in computers (in contrast to differentiation, where such errors prevent us from getting a result as accurate as we desire on the computer). Finally, integration is thought of as a somewhat difficult mathematical concept to grasp, and programming integration should greatly help with the understanding of what integration is and how it works. Not only shall we understand how to use the computer to integrate, but we shall also learn a series of good habits to ensure your computer work is of the highest scientific quality. In particular, we have a strong focus on how to write Matlab code that is free of programming mistakes.
Svein Linge, Hans Petter Langtangen

Open Access

4. Solving Ordinary Differential Equations

Differential equations constitute one of the most powerful mathematical tools to understand and predict the behavior of dynamical systems in nature, engineering, and society. A dynamical system is some system with some state, usually expressed by a set of variables, that evolves in time. For example, an oscillating pendulum, the spreading of a disease, and the weather are examples of dynamical systems. We can use basic laws of physics, or plain intuition, to express mathematical rules that govern the evolution of the system in time. These rules take the form of differential equations. You are probably well experienced with equations, at least equations like $$ax+b=0$$ or $$ax^{2}+bx+c=0$$. Such equations are known as algebraic equations, and the unknown is a number. The unknown in a differential equation is a function, and a differential equation will almost always involve this function and one or more derivatives of the function. For example, $$f^{\prime}(x)=f(x)$$ is a simple differential equation (asking if there is any function f such that it equals its derivative – you might remember that e x is a candidate).
The present chapter starts with explaining how easy it is to solve both single (scalar) first-order ordinary differential equations and systems of first-order differential equations by the Forward Euler method. We demonstrate all the mathematical and programming details through two specific applications: population growth and spreading of diseases.
Svein Linge, Hans Petter Langtangen

Open Access

5. Solving Partial Differential Equations

The subject of partial differential equations (PDEs) is enormous. At the same time, it is very important, since so many phenomena in nature and technology find their mathematical formulation through such equations. Knowing how to solve at least some PDEs is therefore of great importance to engineers. In an introductory book like this, nowhere near full justice to the subject can be made. However, we still find it valuable to give the reader a glimpse of the topic by presenting a few basic and general methods that we will apply to a very common type of PDE.
We shall focus on one of the most widely encountered partial differential equations: the diffusion equation, which in one dimension looks like
$$\frac{\partial u}{\partial t}=\beta\frac{\partial^{2}u}{\partial x^{2}}+g\thinspace.$$
The multi-dimensional counterpart is often written as
$$\frac{\partial u}{\partial t}=\beta\nabla^{2}u+g\thinspace.$$
We shall restrict the attention here to the one-dimensional case.
The unknown in the diffusion equation is a function $$u(x,t)$$ of space and time. The physical significance of u depends on what type of process that is described by the diffusion equation. For example, u is the concentration of a substance if the diffusion equation models transport of this substance by diffusion. Diffusion processes are of particular relevance at the microscopic level in biology, e.g., diffusive transport of certain ion types in a cell caused by molecular collisions. There is also diffusion of atoms in a solid, for instance, and diffusion of ink in a glass of water.
Svein Linge, Hans Petter Langtangen

Open Access

6. Solving Nonlinear Algebraic Equations

As a reader of this book you are probably well into mathematics and often ‘‘accused’’ of being particularly good at ‘‘solving equations’’ (a typical comment at family dinners!). However, is it really true that you, with pen and paper, can solve many types of equations? Restricting our attention to algebraic equations in one unknown x, you can certainly do linear equations: $$ax+b=0$$, and quadratic ones: $$ax^{2}+bx+c=0$$. You may also know that there are formulas for the roots of cubic and quartic equations too. Maybe you can do the special trigonometric equation $$\sin x+\cos x=1$$ as well, but there it (probably) stops. Equations that are not reducible to one of the mentioned cannot be solved by general analytical techniques, which means that most algebraic equations arising in applications cannot be treated with pen and paper!
If we exchange the traditional idea of finding exact solutions to equations with the idea of rather finding approximate solutions, a whole new world of possibilities opens up. With such an approach, we can in principle solve any algebraic equation.
Let us start by introducing a common generic form for any algebraic equation:
$$f(x)=0\thinspace.$$
Here, $$f(x)$$ is some prescribed formula involving x. For example, the equation
$$e^{-x}\sin x=\cos x$$
has
$$f(x)=e^{-x}\sin x-\cos x\thinspace.$$
Just move all terms to the left-hand side and then the formula to the left of the equality sign is $$f(x)$$.
Svein Linge, Hans Petter Langtangen

Backmatter

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