Hi all, I’m getting ready to teach a new course in the fall – a 400-level computational physics class – and I’m on the verge of making the (exciting? daunting? rash?) decision to use Julia as the primary language for it despite being quite new to the Julia ecosystem myself. I’ve been working on a s…

Good, This is nice decision. You can suggest your students these links as additional resources. index — Interactive Computational Thinking — MIT

[image] DanielSussman: a 400-level computational physics class What does it mean? [image] DanielSussman: Finding it is not too hard, though: my webpage is dmsussman"dot"org, and just navigate home page → teaching → Phys 436; the link is in the last sentence at the bottom. Direct links…

First, thanks for adding the direct link when I wasn’t able to! Also, sorry for not providing the context: “400-level…” means that most students taking it will be 3rd or 4th year university students, and in this case the students will mostly be majoring in physics. The prerequisites for the class, …

Definitely! I mention in it the first chapter (A.4 “Notebooks and IDEs” – while I don’t use notebooks much myself, I think having it work out of the box in colab will be great for students!

That’s what I get for glancing over the text and not noticing stuff about Colab. Also, I don’t know if you have it in the main textbook, a word of caution about making your own macros might be beneficial to your students new to programming in Julia. This thought came to mind when you mentioned macr…

That’s what I get for glancing over the text…. No worries — I appreciate that you took the time to take even a quick look! Also, I don’t know if you have it in the main textbook, a word of caution about making your own macros… Totally agree. At the moment I’m at ~50 pages for this intro mater…

Overall I think this is a really good intro to Julia. It doesn’t fall into the trap of trying to entirely or nearly entirely explain each aspect at once (the Manual does, but to be fair, that’s what Manuals are for), and it gets people doing math throughout the whole process instead of settling for …

Julia has been the primary driver of the (mandatory) computational physics course at the University of Cologne for more than 6 years. See e.g. Computational Condensed Matter Physics | Simon Trebst (in German)

Julia has been the primary driver… [at] Cologne… Thanks for the link! Just to be completely clear if the way I phrased it above was ambiguous – any potential trepidation about having the class be based on Julia was not meant to reflect any uncertainty about whether it was fit for the purpose, but…

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trung June 2, 2025, 9:31pm 5

There was this recent post about support for Julia in Google Colab (Julia in Colab). I wonder if a small blurb about Julia in Colab would be beneficial.

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Feedback on an "Intro to Julia" guide for a university course

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