Assignments¶

Welcome to the course! This page has the homework assignments and will be updated throughout the semester. As stated in the syllabus, homework assignments are due the Wednesday before class at 5pm

Week One (Jan. 16)¶

“Introduction to Mathematica“¶

There’s a lot of reading this week, but don’t feel like you have to master any of it yet. We want to get you started quickly on topics, but we have to introduce a lot before you can do anything interesting. You’ll likely be reviewing this material through January 22 to complete the homework for that week. Go ahead and look at the homework for next week so you can get a feel for how much you’ll need to comprehend this week from the material. We’ll return to sections later as we need them, and will often list them as part of the required reading.

Assignment due before class this week: Only the reading! Might browse through the whole book if you want to see what’s ahead, and to see some pretty examples.

Presentation: Week1.pdf

Week Two (Jan. 23)¶

“Introduction to Mathematica: Simple programs, graphing”¶

Assignment due before class this week: Assignment 1.

Presentation: Week2.pdf

Week Three (Jan. 30)¶

“Introduction to Mathematica: Simple programs”¶

Assignment due before class this week: Assignment 2.

Presentation: Week3.pdf

Week Four (Feb. 6)¶

“Mathematica: Reading in data, simple analysis”¶

This weeks marks the brief shift into applying the structures we’ve learned about with Mathematica to real problems rather than little toys. Most assignments (including the one due this week) that have a Mathematica component will now have some data associated with them that you will then use to perform analysis. This week, the assignment is more about graphing the raw data, but we’ll soon move to applying fits to the data, plotting those, plotting error bars, etc. We’ll take a break from Mathematica in a couple weeks to learn about LaTeX so we can present our results in a more formal way.

Assignment due before class this week: Assignment 3.

Data file for assignment (9 MB): Assignment 3 Data.

Presentation: Week4.pdf

Examples from class: Week4Examples.nb

Week Five (Feb. 13)¶

Assignment due before class this week: Assignment 4.

Data file for assignment (600 KB): Halley's Comet Data.

Week Six (Feb. 20)¶

This is the last week of Mathematica for a while (not last week - sorry)! We’ll begin looking at LaTeX next!

Assignment due before class this week: Assignment 5.

Data file for assignment (600 KB): Halley's Comet Data.

Week Seven (Feb. 27)¶

Intro to LaTeX¶

Assignment due before class this week: Assignment 6 PDF (Source)

Try typesetting the source before beginning the assignment - if it doesn’t let me know because you won’t be able to complete the assignment otherwise.

Week Eight (Mar. 6)¶

Mathematics in LaTeX¶

The start of doing mathematics in LaTeX. Here’s the MIT lecture with nearly everything you need to know for the assignment.

Assignment due before class this week: Assignment 7 PDF

Week Nine (Mar. 20)¶

New Commands and Figures¶

Lecture on new commands and figures: Lecture 8 PDF

Assignment due before class this week: Assignment 8 PDF

Week Ten (Mar. 27)¶

Tables, Arrays, and Matrices¶

Lecture on new commands and figures: Lecture 10 PDF

Assignment due before class this week: None

Week Eleven (Apr. 3)¶

Units and Chemistry¶

Installation Problems?

(Evan here) I had trouble getting siunitx and mhchem to work. If you’re using MiKTeX (Windows), then you can use the package manager (in Windows 7 start menu, that’s “MiKTeX <version>/Maintenance (Admin)/Package Manager (Admin)”). You’ll need to install l3kernel and l3packages then siunitx and mhchem (just search for them by name - you might need to use the menu “Repository > Synchronize” to update the listings - then click them and click the “+”). After that, things compiled normally. I had a lot of difficulty trying to download packages directly from CTAN.

Lecture on new commands and figures: Lecture 11 PDF

Assignment due before class this week: Assignment 9 PDF

Week Twelve (Apr. 10)¶

BibTeX¶

Interactive lesson on BibTeX.

Assignment due before class this week: Assignment 10 PDF

Sample working BibTeX example: TeX file bibliography

Week Thirteen (Apr. 17)¶

Z-Scores, P-Values, Confidence Intervals, Model Fits¶

PDF from last week: Week 12

PDF for this week: Week 13

Final Project (May 2)¶

The final projects are here! There are three options. The first is about basketball scores and is generally the more “fun” application of our techniques (which shows how versatile they are!). The second more closely resembles a Modern Lab project. You’ll use simulated spectral data to look at the Hubble constant. Finally, the third option is an open-ended assignment to essentially produce, as we have done, a set of data, a Mathematica script to analyze it, and a $$\LaTeX$$ document detailing what you did. Please review the assignment carefully, but feel free to contact us with any questions.

Assignment information is here: Final Project