Effective Scientific Computation
Importance of Computation in Science
Over time, the importance of computers in research has risen and has undoubtedly become a vital resource in most technical projects. The field that birthed from their prominence, scientific computing, which had traditionally concerned itself with numerical methods, has evolved to encompass performance, hardware, and engineering considerations.
To reliably perform their work, physicists now have to be aware of how to get the most out of these machines by learning best practices, such as maintainable code, and available technologies, such as Pandas and SciKit Learn.
Scope of the series
This series of lectures has the objective of providing physics students with tools so that they can rapidly develop their coding skills by learning the fundamentals of programming, essential tools for collaboration and code maintenance, and the most important modules when dealing with Scientific Computing in Physics, most of them inherited from Data Science.
Notice that this series isn't on programming but rather on scientific computation. This subtle but important distinction indicates that the focus lies on the use of code as a tool that is incorporated into the arsenal of the physicist, rather than the object of study or focus.
At this time, the full scope of the series is open-ended: content can and will be added with feedback from the sessions.
Format
The lectures will be given either presentially at Projecto 21 or online over Zoom, always in Portuguese.
Each session will have practical examples provided as Jupyter Notebooks and some supporting material provided as a PDF.
