Introduction to Python

Python provides by default:

Basic operations

+  Addition
-  Subtraction
*  Multiplication
/  Division
** Exponentiation
abs(x) Absolute value of x
%   Remainder of a/b
//  Integer part of a/b

Basic High-Level Data Types

• Numbers: 10, 10.0, 1.0e+01, ( 10.0+3j )
• Strings, Unicode: “Hello World!”, u”Hello World!”
• Lists: [‘abc’, 3, “x”]
• Tuples: (‘abc’, 3, ‘x’)
• Dictionnaries: {‘key1’:’abc’, ‘key2’: 3, ‘key3’:’x’}

Exercise 1

Use Python as a simple calculator. Try the previous operations on different numbers (integers, floats, …).

Define an array a = [1, 2, 3] What is the result of 2a[2] ? What is the result of 2a ?

Combine operations and data types and comment your findings.

Conclusion

Without additional libraries, Python is almost useless for scientific computing.

Go to the introduction to Numpy.