Welcome to the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Mathematics of Planet Earth. The objective of this short course is to ensure that everyone in the CDT cohort has the programming and computing skills which are necessary for the core CDT modules and to start out as a mathematics researcher.
In particular we will be covering two things:
- The use of revision control software to manage and protect your work as it develops.
- Scientific programming in Python.
We will start out with an introduction to git, a leading revision control system. This introduction is provided by software carpentry, a programme which teaches computing skills to scientists.
The Python course is based on a course taught to geoscience students at Imperial College London. To get our hands on programming as early as possible, we'll start out using Jupyter Notebook which is a friendly "web-based interactive computational environment where you can combine code execution, text, mathematics, plots and rich media into a single document". This will allow us to develop and execute our programs alongside the lecture notes, instead of having to switch between the two.
After a few days we'll switch to working with Python programs written in files and using Python on the command line. This way of using Python is the primary way that Python is used in the sort of computational mathematics which is common in the Planet Earth application domain.