Computational Tools

Catalog description

This course will introduce students to several programming languages and basic programming techniques, with the focus on developing practical code-writing skills for scientific/engineering problem solving. Topics to be covered include: manipulation with numbers, strings, variables, lists, and arrays; creating functions; flow control; data manipulation; imperative, functional, and object-oriented programming; visualization; and presentation. LaTeX will also be introduced for typesetting professional technical documents. This course will also discuss information theory as a sample application area of computational tools. Topics include: information and entropy, mutual information, information coding and compression, Markov information source model, statistical complexity, and computational complexity. Students will write codes in their preferred language to calculate various information theoretic measurements of real-world data. Cross-listed with SSIE 500.