This is a 2nd year undergraduate course for geoscientists taught by Matthew Piggott. It is designed to be a first introduction to numerical methods.
Each lecture will cover:
- some introductory mathematics/theory underlying the numerical methods
- implementation exercises to help understand the theory
- programming exercises where we will implement algorithms from scratch ourselves
- examples of how Python libraries can be used to apply the methods we cover
Link to lectures
For an up to date list of links to the lecture and associated material click here: lecture series.
Pre-requisite knowledge
Your year 1 Introduction to Programming for Geoscientists module is a prerequisite to taking this course. Please refer back to this to remind yourself of introductory information on Python.
You can also find some useful introductory Python material here ESE Primer.
Jupyter notebook
The lectures notes are written in Jupyter notebook. This is a web-based interactive computational environment where you can combine code execution, text, mathematics, plots etc into a single document.
For some information on Jupyter notebooks for this module specifically see: Jupyter notebooks.
Supplementary material
This course loosely follows the text book “Numerical Methods in Engineering with Python 3” by Jaan Kiusalaas. There are many copies in the library so do not feel that you have to buy it. As explained above, you do not have to read this book to excel in this course as the online course material is self contained. However, it is a good resource if you want to broaden your understanding of the subject.