Preface

This /cs-notes/nm webpage is a hobby project that aims to create a collection of notes on numerical methods (and analysis) in an orderly fashion. These notes are inspired by the lecture given by Tomasz Romaczukiewicz, some books, and some web articles, but customized on my own. I’ll be adding (or appending or amending) the contents suitably related to this field and will polish them time and again. I hope this work will be helpful for you too.

We’ll be using Python v3.x for all the coding examples. This language is easy to get you to start, and prototyping the concepts. But, for numerical intensive work, I recommend C++ (or Julia or rust). For illustrations via animation, I’ll use manim or matplotlib. While replicating the examples, I recommend using Jupyter Lab or vscode plugin for Jupyter. Since I’m trained to become a physicist so, some of the examples will be related to physics. I hope you don’t feel discouraged if your interest is not in physics. But, you’ll learn so many things related to CS, maths, statistics, and finance which is a win-win situation for you 😃.

Here are some essential settings that we will be using throughout the notes. You can copy and run it in the first cell of your Jupyter notebook (or online using binder, or colab).

# matplotlib settings
from matplotlib import rcParams  # https://matplotlib.org/stable/api/matplotlib_configuration_api.html#matplotlib.rcParams
import shutil  # https://docs.python.org/3/library/shutil.html
rcParams['figure.dpi'] = 120
rcParams['figure.figsize'] = [12,6]
rcParams['font.size'] = 12
rcParams['axes.grid'] = True
rcParams['text.usetex']= True if shutil.which('latex') else False  # Checks if latex is installed. Since, matplotlib.checkdep_usetex(True) will be depreciated in Python >=3.6. So, we use python's standard library named shutil instead.

Want to give a shout-out?

Started working on the notes on Numerical methods on my webpage: https://t.co/eGkOJr4PVS

Hope this helps you in some way :)

— Damodar Rajbhandari (@physicslog) February 13, 2023

Acknowledgment of Places & Countries

I want to acknowledge the places and countries where I’ve been to and worked on this project.

• 2021 This work was started when I’m at Jagiellonian University [Uniwersytet Jagielloński (PL)], & in Cracow [Kraków (PL)]; the beautiful, historic and iconic city of Poland
• 2022 Jagiellonian University, & in Cracow
• 2023 Jagiellonian University, & in Adelaide [Tarntanya (Kaurna)]; the beautiful city of Australia.