Py4Science @ University of North Dakota

On my second attempt to popularize Python and its scientific computing ecosystem I volunteered to introduce interested people in an interactive tutorial session as a part of the University of North Dakota 2010 Scholarly Forum program. The Graduate School kindly helped and supported me for this one-of-a-kind interactive presentation in the Forum history.

The session was advertised on the Scholarly Forum web-page and e-mails were circulated throughout the campus spreading the session information. The first half-hour of the tutorial was spent installing and demonstrating the PythonXY, Enthought Python Distribution [EPD] and Sage via the notebook interface. After introducing the Python language we briefly went over the most fundamental members of the Py4Science family; IPython, NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, SymPy, and Enthought Tool Suite [ETS]. Along with the technical demonstrations I presented how developments are made in open-source environments and try to emphasize the blurring line of user-developer distinction in Py4Science habitat. I provided some selected resources for the attenders to their further study. I finished the tutorial by showing some advanced level examples demonstrating the powers of Python in scientific computing. Lastly, I invited everyone to the upcoming SciPy10 conference that will take place in Austin, Texas starting on June 28.

You can access the slides of the tutorial by clicking this link.


Acknowledgements:

Although the original title of the tutorial was "Python and Scientific Computing in Open-Source" I have chosen to use Py4Science name by following the Fernando Pérez's tradition. I am thankful to my faculty advisor David Delene for joining us and introducing me and telling us an exciting Python news from the European Aerosol-Cloud Research [EUCARI] group. Susan Caraher of the Graduate School helped me with some of the logistics of the session and Vicki Thompson of the Continuing Education department provided eight PythonXY installed laptops for our use. Thanks to Enthought for allowing us to use multiple copies of their EPD. Finally, I am indebted to Jarrod Millman for providing me some of the t-shirts from the previous SciPy conferences. His kind jest inevitably doubled the joy of my teaching experience.