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Learning computer programming

Hi all,

I am a Maths and Further Maths student holding an offer to study Maths at Oxford next year (whoop whoop!), and I am very interested in learning some kind of computer programming, mainly to write mathematical programmes but the maths I want to be using is (I think) too complicated for Excel which I sometimes use. Any ideas where to start?

Reply 1

acomber

If you want to do mathematical stuff then probably Haskell - https://www.haskell.org/

Reply 2

Gregorius

Original post by Rev16

It depends somewhat on what you mean by "mathematical programmes" - for example, in my statistical work I use the "R" language (which is a bit like "C" :wink:

a lot, and if I need to do any serious numerical computations, I turn to C or to C++. It's very much a case of choosing the instrument for the task at hand!

So, mathematicians doing heavy numerical computations will tend to use C/C++ or Fortran - or they will turn to one of the packages specifically designed for numerical computations, such as Matlab. I do notice that Oxford University's computational mathematics course is based around Matlab, so you might like to consider that.

On the other hand, if you're interested in heavy algebraic manipulation, then you'll tend to use packages like Mathematica or Maple (I use the former quite a lot, day to day). If you specialize in something like algebra, number theory of algebraic geometry, there are specialized languages/packages for these too (like Pari/GP).

So, quite a lot of choice! My advice to a beginner would be to choose a language that will teach you the basics well - then you will be well-set to go on and use different languages/packages later in your career. So I tend to recommend Python as a good language to get started with and then to go on to something like C or C++. also, in the mean-time get used to using packages like Matlab/Mathematica

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