Part of my role at MathWorks involves supporting academics in the use of their tools.  Every now and then I get involved with co-supervising projects which usually involves some element of assessment.  Ever since the advent of ChatGPT, I have noticed that students like to ‘delve’ into topics a lot more than they used to.  The topics that are being delved...

I recently had the opportunity to appear on Jousef Murad’s podcast Deep Dive. My appearance was sponsored by my employer, MathWorks, but I was given free reign to talk about pretty much whatever I wanted. So I chose to talk about Research Software Engineering and the techniques from software engineering that I think every scientist and engineer should...

Feel free to discuss and contribute to this article over at the corresponding GitHub repo. Many people suggest that you should use version control as part of your scientifc workflow. This is usually quickly followed up by recommendations to learn git and to put your project on GitHub. Learning and doing all of this for the first time takes a lot of...

My stepchildren are pretty good at mathematics for their age and have recently learned about Pythagora’s theorem $c=\sqrt{a^2+b^2}$ The fact that they have learned about this so early in their mathematical lives is testament to its importance. Pythagoras is everywhere in computational science and it may well be the case that you’ll need to compute...

In many introductions to numpy, one gets taught about np.ones, np.zeros and np.empty. The accepted wisdom is that np.empty will be faster than np.ones because it doesn’t have to waste time doing all that initialisation. A quick test in a Jupyter notebook shows that this seems to be true! import numpy as np N = 200 zero_time = %timeit...

What is Second Order Cone Programming (SOCP)?   Second Order Cone Programming (SOCP) problems are a type of optimisation problem that have applications in many areas of science, finance and engineering. A summary of the type of problems that can make use of SOCP, including things as diverse as designing antenna arrays, finite impulse response...