Dr. David Vasholz, Instructor

This hands-on course is designed for engineers and scientists engaged in the exploration and solution of challenging quantitative problems. Mathematica is a powerful problem solving language that runs on all major platforms and operating systems. It has become a standard tool for both engineering and design, and by now many of the world's important new products rely at one stage or another in their design on Mathematica. The instructor has used it extensively since 1992 in different scientific areas and has found it extremely effective for the creation, communication, and documentation of technical work. The course will start from the beginning with basic concepts and will give the attendees a working knowledge of Mathematica. A large variety of examples will be presented to illustrate the general concepts. More extended case studies will be treated, drawn from the instructor's experience in such areas as data processing, hydrodynamics, stochastic processes, oceanography, and optics. The students will receive these examples on diskette to provide a tool kit of working programs upon which to build. The interactive course presentations are themselves created and presented from within the Mathematica language. Attendees will have the opportunity to create short studies and programs in-class for their own particular areas of interest with assistance from the instructor. They will be provided with web sites that provide Mathematica support.

Instructor

Dr. David Vasholz is on the Principal Professional Staff at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), which he joined in 1978. He received his BS in mathematics and physics from Valparaiso University and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has used Mathematica in a wide variety of areas at APL, including oceanography, stochastic processes, magnetics, optics, acoustics, and the hydrodynamics of stratified flow. He has published numerous technical reports and scientific journal articles in these areas.

What You Will Learn

• How to perform basic operations that include numerical calculations, symbolic processing, plotting, and dealing with external files.
• How to avoid common pitfalls; staying on good terms with the kernel.
• How to use the kernel "on the fly" with annotations to explore problems and fully document solutions.
• How to rapidly produce attractive graphics that are fully labeled and annotated.
• How to exploit powerful pattern-matching capabilities to accomplish large amounts of work.
• How to write Mathematica programs and seamlessly integrate them into the overall system.

Course Outline

1. Introduction — A "demonstration tour" of Mathematica, including numerical calculations, integrals and derivatives, equation solutions, graphics, programming, image processing, and string manipulations. Short history and overall description.

2. Front End — Properties of the user interface. Notebooks, notebook navigation and formats. The creation and organization of technical documents.

3. Kernel — Mathematica as a dialog. The kernel as a numerical evaluator, symbolic manipulator, and producer of graphics. Built-in functions. Altering the kernel; direct and delayed assignments.

4. Expressions — Everything is an expression. Prototypes and examples. Recursive nature. Brackets, braces, and parentheses. Patterns and pattern matching. Rules and their basic properties. Patterns in combination with delayed assignments; programs. Delayed rules. Anonymous functions. Especially useful built-in functions.

5. Graphics — Graphics objects as expressions. Graphics primitives. Two- and three-dimensional plots. Options. The power of pattern matching in graphics manipulations and transformations. Built-in graphics packages. Coloring, shading, and lighting effects in three-dimensional graphics.

6. Programming — Programs versus "free-form" exploration and documentation. Programming styles. Contexts and packages. Examination of built-in programming examples.

7. Extended Examples and Case Studies — Gaussian random variables. Calibration data analysis. Simulation and analysis of a random signal. Three-dimensional shapes. Building a camera. Constructing a triad. Magnetic sensor diagrams. Manipulations of partial differential equations. Extended technical documents in Mathematica. Rotations and Euler angles. An exercise in photogrammetry. Analysis of magnetic sensor data. Internal wave Green's function. Dealing with large expressions. Glitter analysis. Problem solving by attendees in their specific areas of interest.

This course will enable you to efficiently use Mathematica in all phases of a t echnical project including symbolic manipulations, numerical evaluations, annotated graphics, viewgraph presentations, and final documentation.

Tuition

Tuition for this three-day course is $1290 per person at one of our scheduled public courses. Onsite pricing is available. Please call us at 410-956-8805 or send an email to ati@ATIcourses.com.

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