Contents

No Bullshit Guide to Mathematics Bonus Lessons

These notebooks lessons are intended to help readers of the book practice using math concepts by learning how to use Python as a calculator.

Contents

  • Tutorials: self-contained knowledge capsules to explain concepts.

  • Missions: your task is to run each of the cells and complete any tasks specified.

General info about notebooks

Interactive sessions with trial-and error in notebooks are the best way to learn technical subjects like coding and math. Anytime you are reading about some coding concepts (e.g. Appendix C in the book), you should have a notebook in which to try things out while you read. The RPSET loop is very powerful:

R read
P predict
SE shift-enter
T think

There is and old saying in Bulgaria that goes “verification is the highest form of trust” (проверката е висша форма на доверие) and you need to follow this principle when learning:’ it’s good to trust the author, but even better to verify for yourself. E.g. if the author says you can use float(3) to convert the number 3 (an int) into a floating point number (a float), then you open a new code call in the notebooks and try this out type(float(3)) to see the type of object.

There are millions of notebooks out there that contain demos, tutorials, stats analysis steps, reports, explorations, etc. You can learn from all these materials (usually available to download for free from a website for code sharing called github) once you get comfortable with running notebooks in the cloud (mybinder notebooks run on cloud computers that you can temporarily borrow, so you don’t need to install anything) or locally (using jupiter you can run notebooks locally—same interface with code blocks and text blocks but running on your computer). Of all the possible notebooks out there for learning Python, Introductory Python tutorials are the best ones, and the notebooks from the SymPy tutorial notebooks are also worth reading (same as Appendix C in the book).

Book plug

For more info, visit the book’s website: https://noBSmath.com The book No Bullshit Guide to Mathematics by Ivan Savov (Fifth edition, Minireference Publishing, v5.4 2020, ISBN 099200103X) is available in both print and digital formats:

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Solving equations