Modeling and Simulation in Python: An Introduction for Scientists and Engineers

  • 3h 4m
  • Allen B. Downey
  • No Starch Press
  • 2023

Modeling and Simulation in Python is a thorough but easy-to-follow introduction to physical modeling—that is, the art of describing and simulating real-world systems.

Readers are guided through modeling things like world population growth, infectious disease, bungee jumping, baseball flight trajectories, celestial mechanics, and more while simultaneously developing a strong understanding of fundamental programming concepts like loops, vectors, and functions.

Clear and concise, with a focus on learning by doing, the author spares the reader abstract, theoretical complexities and gets right to hands-on examples that show how to produce useful models and simulations.

About the Author

Allen Downey is a Staff Producer at Brilliant and Professor Emeritus at Olin College, where he taught Modeling and Simulation and other classes related to software and data science. He is the author of several textbooks, including Think Python, Think Bayes, and Elements of Data Science. Previously, he taught at Wellesley College and Colby College. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1997. His undergraduate and master's degrees are from the Civil Engineering department at MIT. He is the author of Probably Overthinking It, a blog about data science and Bayesian statistics.

In this Book

  • Introduction
  • Introduction to Modeling
  • Modeling a Bike Share System
  • Iterative Modeling
  • Parameters and Metrics
  • Building a Population Model
  • Iterating the Population Model
  • Limits to Growth
  • Projecting Into the Future
  • Analysis and Symbolic Computation
  • Case Studies Part I
  • Epidemiology and Sir Models
  • Quantifying Interventions
  • Sweeping Parameters
  • Nondimensionalization
  • Thermal Systems
  • Solving the Coffee Problem
  • Modeling Blood Sugar
  • Implementing the Minimal Model
  • Case Studies Part II
  • The Falling Penny Revisited
  • Drag
  • Two-Dimensional Motion
  • Optimization
  • Rotation
  • Torque
  • Case Studies Part III
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