Using Python to teach mathematics, physics, and acoustics
Derek C. Thomas, Benjamin Y. Christensen · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2014
Advanced technical courses often suffer from a lack of interactive materials. Common tools to remedy this deficiency include MATLAB and Mathematica, both of which can be prohibitively expensive to obtain outside of the university environment. Python is a scripted language that is easy to read and use and is rapidly emerging as a lingua franca for scientific computing due to the flexibility and facility of the language, the large and active community, and the large number of high quality scientific libraries that are available in Python. Python provides a free and open source tool to develop classroom materials that students can modify and extend. We discuss the use of Python in teaching advanced topics in mathematics, physics, and acoustics. Examples are drawn from courses in acoustics, mechanics, and mathematical and computational physics