Review of Algebra

In class today we reviewed the concepts from the Algebra chapter.

You can see a recording of the class here

We started off with the quiz reviewing a number of concepts and I’m really sorry I messed up the last question. I declared Cian (who was leading at the penultimate question) the winner however I got my to my desk and input the correct answer in the slide, mentimeter was able to redo the results (I should have just done this in class) and in fact Joe won! So Joe and Ben lead the quiz with 1 win each.

In class today we ended up discussing a number of things as you all asked great questions:

• We spoke about code conventions and how sympy.Equation uses a capital E because it follows the convention for creating a thing/object. This differs from sympy.solveset (which uses a small s) because this does something.
• We also talked a bit about different types of errors, for example a NameError is Python telling you that it does not know what something is. A SyntaxError is Python telling you that you’re not writing Python.
• We talked about what the Python Kernel actually is. There is a chapter of Python for Mathematics that goes over this: Kernels if anyone is interested in understanding this further.

One thing I did not think we had time to do was cover the coursework like exercise from the handout. Do attempt to do that (as well as all the other practice exercises available to you) and I’ll happily find time for us to go over it together.