Numerical methods for Physics and Astronomy

This class will use the Julia programming language as well as Python's matplotlib library for visualizations.

Prerequisites

Julia setup

Install the latest Julia from https://julialang.org/downloads/

VSCode Setup

Enable the Julia extension in VScode.

PyPlot setup for Windows and Linux

Under Windows and Linux, launch Julia, press ] to open its package manager then type add PyPlot.

PyPlot setup for OSX

To use the default python within Julia, type :

ENV["PYTHON"]=""
ENV["MPLBACKEND"]="qt5agg"

Then go to the package manager ] and type add PyCall, then add PyPlot.

Check that you can use the REPL

1. Launch julia from the command line.

2. Check that it can do basic operations, e.g. input 2+2 then press enter.

3. Check that it can plot basic functions using the PyPlot library.

using PyPlot
x=range(-pi, pi, length=100)
plot(x,sin.(x))
grid()

Learning Julia

These three links should get you started:

1. https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/julia/
2. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Chapter_HPC_8_Julia.pdf
3. https://computationalthinking.mit.edu/Fall23/

If you already master Matlab or Python also check https://cheatsheets.quantecon.org/

Also see http://juliaastro.github.io for useful functions in Astronomy.