Workshop on Symbolic Computing for Knight Hacks
I gave a workshop on symbolic computing for Knight Hacks, UCF’s programming club.
There some mildly organized code and workshop notes on GitHub. Because this was an introduction for an audience which didn’t have all that much programming experience or computing background I decided to cover the basics.
- what makes symbolic computing different from numerical methods?
- declaring variables in SymPy
- what are some main “gotchas” when using SymPy?
- how can you use this to do your calculus or linear algebra homework
- explaining my process for exporting answers to LaTeX
Overall went really well, got good feedback, and even got some people in the audience involved in discussion. I think relating it to everyone’s favorite calculus to hate, “volume of solids of rotation” was a good way to explain the concepts. Its also a good launching point for discussing stuff like Fourier transforms and functionals since its exposure to how functions can essentially be input/output to other functions in a mathematical context.