Description:

• playing makes learning fun. And how do you make learning mathematics fun? Obviously playing with mathematical abstractions. Early days people used to play with mathematical objects using pen and paper. But imagine playing with repetitive things using pen and paper. That will make it boring soon, won't it?
  • in this talk I will show you how Python can be used to make simple to advanced iterative mathematics fun. Yes you are reading it right. From shuffling of a deck, sequences of numbers, calculus these are few steps of our journey through iterative mathematics using python.
  • I will be using basic python data structures , list comprehensions, and some functional programming aspects to demonstrate this. ‌
  • take aways from this talk - if you are a maths enthusiast , you will understand how to write python code to solve your problem. If you are a programmer you will understand how do you make use of simple python functionality to do recreations in mathematics.

Contents of talk

• What is iteration in mathematics? (5min)

  • riffle shuffle, four number game, SSQ, SUM, kaprekar iteration
  • iterative sequence of a mathematical function

• Iterations in Python (5 min)

  • the iteration protocol
  • list comprehensions

• Lets do mathematics using python (5 min)

  • python functions for riffle shuffle, four number game , SSQ,SUM, kaprekar iteration
  • iterations of above functions

• Functions as first class objects! (5min)

  • fixed point of a function ‌

• Examining the sequences created by functions (5 min)

  • using generators in Python

• Iterative geometry (5 min)

Prerequisites:

School level mathematics and zeal for recreational mathematics

Content URLs:

Adventure in iterations notebook

Speaker Info:

Vikrant has over 12 years of experience in crafting software solutions. He conducts python trainings through pipal academy. He has worked on diverse areas like Computational Fluid Dynamics, mathematical algorithms for bioinformatics, network-based license servers etc. He has worked at Strand Life Sciences and DRDO. He has a Masters in Computational Science from Indian Institute of Science.

Speaker Links:

vikipedia