2 Credits, May 19 – June 8, MTWRF  10:00 – 12:00am

Text: Programming in Mathematica,
by R.Gaylord, S. Kamin, P. Wellin, (Springer-Verlag),
and Notes on Using Mathematica at UND, a set of lecture notes by W. Schwalm.

What is Mathematica?  It is a symbolic  programming language. It does symbolic operations of algebra and calculus, as well as number crunching.  It is a higher-level computer language (C-based) that lets you work algebra one line at a time, or write powerful programs for simulations, calculations, or graphics. It is a vast and powerful system for doing mathematics. It is available to students at UND.

Who should take this course? Any Physical Science Engineering, Mathematics majors, or anyone at all interested in learning a powerful new tool.

What do we get?  The goal of this year's summer course is to get hands-on experience, line-by-line solution of problems involving math, symbolic programming, good graphics, full-color animations of design projects or computer simulations.   Most of the programing takes only a few lines.  You will be surprised  how much is accomplished by just writing a few lines of Mathematica code.    Doing exercises will enhance your mathematical thinking and puzzle-solving ability. You will write about 100 short Mathematica programs (Most of them only a few lines).  This is equivalent to doing almost all exercises from Gaylord's textbook.   So after listening to a short lecture you will end up writing short Mathematica programs during the three week course.    While writing short simple programs we will teach you the tricks which you do not easily get from reading  textbooks:  How to avoid getting pages and pages of garbage when you try to solve an  algebraic or differential equation,  how Mathematica deals with branch cuts, and so on.      If you seriously apply yourself  during the three week period you will be amazed to find how much you have learned and find yourself a pretty good Mathematica programmer in the end.   Next fall if you continue using Mathematica to do course work you will find  the much of it becomes  easier than it would be without having skills of Mathematica programing.