I share these emails to my students from time to time, to document the progress of an 8th grade online class. The Notebook I was working on today. https://github.com/4dsolutions/elite_school/blob/master/TheCabal.ipynb -- Kirby ========== From: Sunshine Elite Education Date: Sun, May 29, 2022 at 7:39 PM Subject: Data Structure and Algorithms in Python: May 29: After Class Review Greetings all -- Tonight's talk was about how those intricate little patches of symbols, in math books, are pretty much algorithms, but in a pre-computer language. We use letters for numbers because the recipes are for a whole variety of inputs. The gears turn, and we get our computed outputs. That's been going on since long before electronic computers. My opening example involved computing the volume of a tetrahedron, regular or irregular, on the basis of its edge lengths only, of which there are six. I showed the Cayley-Menger algorithm for computing that, which involves taking the "determinant of a matrix" a topic in some high school math curricula (e.g IB, AP) but not all. Python's sympy was able to take that matrix and convert it to a lot of terms under a radical sign (2nd root symbol). Using plane nets, I was able to compute the volume of: * a regular tetrahedron of edges 1 * an "A module" (1/24th of the above) * an "E module" (1/120th of a rhombic triacontahedron) This is shoptalk from a niche geometry I specialize in studying. I was demonstrating how I make use of the same tools I'm teaching, when doing my own geometry research. Python and mathematics weave together in Jupyter Notebooks to give you symbolic operations with sympy, plotting capability (graphing) with matplotlib, and tabular data (pandas -- coming up). During the 2nd half of the talk, we dove deep into Python's capabilities, reviewing the role of __special_names__ ("__ribs__") via the Ornery class <https://replit.com/@kurner/Ornery-Type>, and then diving into @properties, which use @decorator syntax. That magic circle source code we looked at is here: https://github.com/4dsolutions/elite_school/blob/master/magic_circle_v2.py Kirby *Course Name*: Data Structure and Algorithms in Python *Datetime*: 01/29-06/19 Wednesday,Sunday 6:00pm-7:00pm *Location*: Online10 Thanks, Sunshine Elite Education