Introduction to the Introduction¶

Welcome! This is a course designed to teach the basics of the Mathematica and \(\LaTeX\) programming languages in order to better prepare you for UT Austin’s PHY 353L (Modern Physics Laboratory) course.

This document is maintained by the UT Austin chapters of the Society of Physics Students and Sigma Pi Sigma, but was initially created for the Spring 2014 offering of PHY 110C by Evan Ott and Will Beason.

Mathematica is a proprietary languaged developed by the Wolfram corporation and is both fairly easy to use, and is the basis for the popular Wolfram|Alpha website. It is by far not the fastest language for analyzing data, but abstracts many parts that become relevant in languages like C or Python. Mathematica is extremely flexible and supports large-scale projects, but in many cases is used for simple one-time applications. It also has typesetting abilities (including presentation-mode) but in practice it is generally used for its analysis capabilities, with results exported to other programs.

\(\LaTeX\) is typically used as a “markup” language, which is to say that it takes the place of other document formatters like Microsoft Word in order to create a presentable document in a fairly standard way. Although Word is now competitive about cross-platform stability, \(\LaTeX\) is the standard for most physics journals. \(\LaTeX\) is based on the \(\TeX\) language, created by Turing Award winner Donald Knuth. Knuth is one of the original experts in many parts of computer science, and his Art of Computer Programming volumes are one of the most widely-accepted texts on a variety of subjects. Knuth was disappointed with the lack of clear, elegant ways of expressing ideas on early displays and created \(\TeX\) to be able to have more control. And yes, \(\LaTeX\) and \(\TeX\) are the correct ways to typeset the names of these languages. However, if not available (in code, use \LaTeX and \TeX), then “LaTeX” and “TeX” will work in a pinch. Lastly, \(\LaTeX\) may be pronounced “lay’-tech” or “lah’-tech”.

The Course¶

This course will first introduce concepts in Mathematica then go through the beginnings of the \(\LaTeX\) language, followed by several sections on how the two may be combined to produce a clean, elegant, and interesting final document. See the Assignments section for the readings.

The Syllabus¶

The current syllabus is accessible through the following links.