About our Mathematica Workshops
Variable Symbols is proud to offer workshops that will help you get the best possible return from your investment in Mathematica. We teach you how to take advantage of Mathematica's strengths and how to work around its limitations.Our workshops are a combination of short lectures, assigned problems, and exercises. To the maximum extent possible, we try to conduct hands-on workshops.
Why should you choose us?
Variable Symbols has been conducting Mathematica workshops since 1989. We have established a track record ofWe have been invited repeatedly to give courses and workshops at institutions, companies, and conferences including Stanford University, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, MITRE, and Mathematica Conferences sponsored by Wolfram Research.
- Experience in using Mathematica and giving workshops
- Outstanding instructors -- Nancy Blachman and Colin Williams
- Clear explanations
- Unbiased perspective of Mathematica's strengths and weaknesses
- Entertaining lecture style
- Problem-solving orientation
Course Descriptions
Our workshops offer a systematic introduction to Mathematica for people who want to get up to speed quickly. We cover important features of Mathematica thoroughly, with clear explanations, excellent examples, and provide challenging and instructive problem sets. Below are descriptions of the workshops that we offer.
Introduction to Mathematica
This workshop provides a nuts-and-bolts approach that will make it easier to learn and use Mathematica, brining together ideas and techniques that are scattered throughout the software's manuals. This course also will be a useful refresher for casual users.You will learn to find commands that you need, understand what they do, and use them effectively. You will learn to use Mathematica to manipulate expressions, find roots, solve differential equations, and visualize functions and data. By the end of the course, you'll be ready to go on to programming.
Programming in Mathematica
In this course, we'll show you how to get started programming in Mathematica. We begin by showing you how to write functions. You'll learn how to read from and write to data files, and how to locate and exploit functions defined in packages. We'll also teach you strategies for debugging your Mathematica programs, how to interpret warning messages, and how to document your own code with usage statements and warning messages.
Advanced Programming
Because the pattern matching capabilities in Mathematica are powerful and can often simplify programs, this course starts by showing examples of functions and expressions that use pattern-matching. We then cover importing and exporting data and conclude by describing the mechanisms used in Mathematica packages and how to write your own.
Mathematica Graphics
Mathematica is an exceptionally flexible and powerful tool for producing mathematical graphics. Mathematica makes it easy to create graphs of functions, plots of data, pictures of geometrical solids, and other mathematical illustrations either with the built-in functions or with simple programs of your own. This course teaches how to use the graphics primitives and how to override the choices that Mathematica makes. You'll learn about the algorithms that Mathematica uses to construct a graph so that you can make the most of Mathematica's graphics capabilities.
What Participants Say about our Workshops
- ``It was the best short computer course I have ever taken.''
Research Scientist
Applied Physics Laboratory
- ``All the course was useful!''
Jeremy Warnes
Directory, Fuji Capital Markets Corporation
- ``I still learn something new and useful every time I attend Nancy's talks and workshops.''
Paul Abbott, PhD
Contributing Editor for The Mathematica Journal and
Lecturer in Physics, The University of Western Australia.
- ``Thanks--Best class in a long time''
Dawn Reg
Product Engineer, Fort Motor Company
- ``This course was great because of the hands-on cooperative learning and enthusiastic professor. It was a thrill to learn the power of Mathematica''
Dan Arquilevich
Research & Development Engineer
Hewlett Packard
- ``The exercises are well chosen and involve interesting conceptual difficulties.''
Claudio J. Fazio
Research Scientist, Naval Research Laboratory
- ``Very applied. I learned things that I can apply tomorrow on my job''
Ed deZabala, Research Engineer
Chevron Oil Field Research Company
- ``This was a great course because of the enthusiasm, knowledge, honesty, and flexibility of the instructor.''
Judah Rosenblatt
Director, Biomathematics
University of Texas, Medical Branch
About the Instructors
Nancy Blachman is one of the nation's leading Mathematica trainers. She has written four popular Mathematica books and was an editor of The Mathematica Journal when it was owned by Academic Press. Nancy has taught classes in problem solving with Mathematica at Stanford University and is an invited speaker at conferences and workshops. She holds degrees in mathematics, operations research, and computer science from the University of Birmingham (UK), the University of California at Berkeley, and Stanford University.
Colin Williams has used Mathematica intensively since 1990 and has given numerous Mathematica tutorials to banks and engineering research labs. He recently co-wrote "CalcLabs with Mathematica" with Nancy Blachman, and "Explorations in Quantum Computing" with Scott Clearwater. Colin also teaches Mathematica at Stanford University. Colin holds a Ph.D. is artificial intelligence and advanced degrees in physics and atmospheric dynamics. He was a research scientist at Xerox PARC and a former research assistant to Prof. Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University.
Variable Symbols, Inc.
650 966 8999
Copyright © 2003 Variable Symbols, Inc.
Last updated May 17, 2003