Numerical Methods in Engineering with Python

by Jaan Kiusalaas

This is a very nice introduction to numerical methods using the very popular programming language python. The author does a great job of introducing both simple and complex concepts. Two things about this book are unique and make it particularly enjoyable to learn from:

  1. very interesting optimization problems that involve using numerical methods from other parts of the book to implement nontrivial objective functions.
  2. quite nontrivial boundary value problems (including fourth-order and nonlinear boundary value problems)
Readers unfamiliar with this book can see what others have said here. Note that there is a second edition of the above book, a Python 3.x version and even a Matlab version of this book. I believe that most of the problems in the different versions are the same but the above book is the one I worked from and there could always be small differences.

To learn this material as well as possible I worked through all of the problems from the text. You can find the material for the computational problems for each chapter by following the links on this page.

After many years of giving this material away for free (in PDF format) I've decided to try to sell copies of it on Amazon. Please look here for the most recent version of the solution manual.

My Code For Various Chapters:
As always, I am interested in hearing about any errors that might exist in this material.

John Weatherwax
Last modified: Mon Oct 20 06:16:24 EDT 2014