03/06/24 - Road Map to Calcalus

Not much happened tonight

Hello all,

Continuing on with my mission tonight, only a little study since I got side-tracked whilst reading the “Lines and Slopes” section.

After writing a bit of maths in LaTeX, and since we are dealing with graphs, I wanted to display the graphs in my notes. However, I went a bit too far trying to plot graphs using Python.

In my experience, I have had not much luck with Python and their virtual environments. I can’t explain it but trying to set up a file to use Matplotlib and NumPy was more difficult than I initially believed.

So, I spent the next few hours trying to get it to work and to display a simple graph so I could save it and place it into my Obsidian notes. But, it was not meant to be. I think it has to do with multiple Pythons installed at once, one through Microsoft Store and the other through MSYS2 MINGW32, since PyCharm couldn’t figure it out (amongst it depleting my storage through its update process).

Then I thought about Julia (and how I want to use it for mathematical programming). So far, I am having more luck. Just had to figure out the package manager and interactive environments.

Now with Plots added to the file, it is set up for writing a script. And that only took me around 30 minutes. Based on the landing page, Plots might be a very powerful tool for maths, physics and chemistry down the track. So, although it’ll be a bit of pain to learn Julia, it’ll likely be very handy to know.

Not much in the way of learning tonight, but setting up some tools for future use.

Thank you for reading, hope you found it different that it won’t always be about the maths or technical stuff.

Steve Frampton.