Welcome to the Course Computer-Based Physical Modelling!

The programming language Python is useful for all kinds of scientific and technical tasks. You can use it to analyze and visualize data. You can also use it to numerically solve scientific problems that are difficult or impossible to solve analytically. Python is freely available and, due to its modular structure, has been expanded with an almost infinite number of modules for various purposes.

This course aims to introduce you to programming with Python. It is primarily aimed at beginners, but we hope it will also be interesting for advanced users. We begin the course with an introduction to the Jupyter Notebook environment, which we will use throughout the entire course. Afterward, we will provide an introduction to Python and show you some basic functions, such as plotting and analyzing data through curve fitting, reading and writing files, which are some of the tasks you will encounter during your physics studies. We will also show you some advanced topics such as animation in Jupyter and the simulation of physical processes in

• Mechanics
• Electrostatics
• Waves
• Optics

If there is time left at the end of the course, we will also take a look at machine learning methods, which have become an important tool in physics as well.

We will not present a comprehensive list of numerical simulation schemes, but rather use the examples to spark your curiosity. Since there are slight differences in the syntax of the various Python versions, we will always refer to the Python 3 standard in the following.