Week 1: Intro

Introductory remarks

• What is Scientific computing

• Purpose of the course

• Slides pdf

Computer hardware

• von Neumann architecture

• cache pitfalls

• Slides pdf

Computer languages

• Machine code

• Assembler code

• Compiled languages

• Interpreted languages

• Just-In-Time compilation

• Julia

• Slides pdf

First contact: Pluto

• What is a Pluto notebook ?

• Pluto notebook: pluto/julia, html, pdf,

First contact: Julia

• Basic information about Julia

• Links to Julia resources

• number types, control structures, functions ...

• Pluto notebook: pluto/julia, html, pdf,

Julia + Pluto installation

• Preferably, use Chrome or Firefox as browsers

• Download Julia and install it according to the procedure on you particular operating system

  • On Windows I recommend to use julia-1.7 which currently is available as release candidate (rc)

• Invoke Julia and issue the following commands:

using Pkg
Pkg.add("Pluto")
using Pluto
Pluto.run()

As a result, you should see the "welcome to Pluto.jl" page in your browser. You can paste the notebook links from this course directly into the "Open from file" input box.

Comprehensive Julia + Pluto installation guide by Fons van der Plas (TU Berlin/MIT Boston) made for the MIT course on Computational Thinking.