Guidelines for the use of materials on this website
This website contains Mathematica notebooks on a variety of technical topics. For the most part, the notebooks assume the reader is familiar with Mathematica. If that is not the case, I recommend working through the introductory material provided at Wolfram.com. There is a wealth of information on Mathematica at that site, including instructive videos. There are also a number of books that serve as useful introductions to Mathematica.
Further, the subject matter treated in the notebooks is not introductory but typically focuses on detailed calculations and solutions of nontrivial problems. The presentation assumes the reader has some familiarity with the subject material. Often a notebook will contain specific references that supplement the presentation. I also provide a list of references below. Finally, I point out that a Wikipedia or a YouTube search will often expose introductory material relevant to subject matter areas treated in the notebooks.
The notebooks on this site are available for download in two formats.
pdf format – This format can be directly viewed on the website and can also be downloaded. Clicking on a pdf link will open a notebook in a pdf reader from which it can be downloaded. Notebooks in pdf format are completely free.
nb format – This format is fully functional and should execute in the Mathematica program. Alas, this format does not display on the web. If a reader does not have a copy of Mathematica, please appreciate that it is often available for students enrolled at educational institutions. In addition, Mathematica is quite reasonably priced for nonprofessional users – either as a standalone program or via the web.
Interested readers should download some of the .nb notebooks to test whether they will work in the reader’s computational environment. This website is a personal effort and I perform no tests of the notebooks other than to ensure they function correctly in my own computing environment (Windows 10 on a Dell XPS 15 laptop). My interest is in generating as many notebooks as possible in available time. I have no ability to ensure these notebooks function in other computing environments.
The following two notebooks should be downloaded before trying to execute any subject matter notebooks. They contain styling elements and various convenience functions used by all other notebooks. These notebooks should reside in the directory from which any other downloaded subject matter notebook is loaded into Mathematica.
- NTGUtilityFunctions.m Required File Download
This Mathematica package style notebook contains various convenience functions used in many of the subject matter notebooks. - NTGStylesheet2.nb Required File Download
This Mathematica StyleSheet notebook used affects the look and feel of all other notebooks.
The following notebooks provide introductory material and should be downloaded to test whether the notebooks will evaluate in your programming environment.
- Introduction to author’s programming style: Mathematica is a flexible language and experienced users develop quite distinct programming styles that can be confusing to new users. In the notebook, I describe and motivate some of the programming styles that I use.
pdf Test nb Download - Some perturbation problems: This notebook focuses on the use of perturbation methods to solve algebraic equations. The development of detailed solution processes for different representative problems allows me to demonstrate, in a simple context, various techniques that used in many of the notebooks found on this website.
pdf Test nb Download