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[WSG23] Daily Study Group: Getting Started with Mathematica and WL

Arben Kalziqi, Wolfram Research
Posted 2 years ago

A Wolfram U daily study group on "Getting Started with Mathematica and the Wolfram Language" (forgive the truncation and abbreviation in the character-limited title...) begins on July 17, 2023. The study group will run for five days through July 21, and each day will run from 11AM to noon CDT.

Join me and a group of fellow learners in a well-paced exploration of some of the fundamental ideas and useful concepts in Mathematica and the Wolfram Language. We'll talk about how you can explore Wolfram Language with ChatGPT, some of the fundamentals of Wolfram Language syntax and the notebook interface, important built-in functions, creating your own functions, visualization techniques, and more!

The idea behind this study group is to rapidly develop a strong foundation for a scientist, engineer, data analyst, or interested hobbyist. As such, no prior Wolfram Language experience or knowledge is necessary.

REGISTER HERE.

I look forward to seeing you there!

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POSTED BY: Arben Kalziqi
18 Replies
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I had to skip watching the first lecture live, so I went back and watched the video. In it you said there were some links provided in the chat space, but these do not appear in the video of the class. Can you provide them again?

Carl
POSTED BY: Carl Hahn

Hey Carl—the links were probably these two:

  1. Get API keys from OpenAI: https://platform.openai.com/account/api-keys
  2. How to use Chatbooks in Wolfram Desktop/Mathematica: https://support.wolfram.com/62525
POSTED BY: Arben Kalziqi

Thank you!

BTW I do enjoy your lectures. You do, as promised, always have a gold nugget or two up your sleeve.

Carl

PS have you given any thought to the Sankey diagram question?
POSTED BY: Carl Hahn
POSTED BY: Arben Kalziqi
POSTED BY: Arben Kalziqi
POSTED BY: Josias Uriel Fossouo Tadie

Hi Josias—it's a .zip, so you should be able to just right click and click "unzip" or "extract" or similar.

POSTED BY: Arben Kalziqi
POSTED BY: Josias Uriel Fossouo Tadie
POSTED BY: Arben Kalziqi

This helps to explain why I couldn't find it—I had forgotten that my Geocomputation lecture is a part of the Computational X-plorations series! You can sign up for that (for free) here: https://www.wolfram.com/wolfram-u/courses/computational-thinking/computational-xplorations-wl100/

We also have a Data Visualization Quick Start which covers some more information on today's topic: https://www.wolfram.com/wolfram-u/courses/visualization-graphics/data-visualization-quick-start-vis001/
POSTED BY: Arben Kalziqi

I put this question in the Q&A today, but I will repeat it here.

How come Mathematica does not have a function to create energy flow graphs (Sankey diagrams)? Seems like something somebody at Wolfram would want to champion.

I have seen some half hearted attempts to address it among users, but too clunky really. See what Lawrence Livermore does with them:

https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/
POSTED BY: Carl Hahn

Please comment. Will MMLs make traditional programming unnecessary?
POSTED BY: Henrick-Mario Ierkic

Please comment. How have Wolfram's approach ( vision, plans, ...) changed because of LLMs? For example, what is the future of Wolfram Alpha? Will WL become a feature of LLMs or the other way around.
POSTED BY: Henrick-Mario Ierkic

At the end of the Day 5 notes there is a link to Mathematica Programming: An Advanced Introduction by Leonid Shifrin When I click on it, I get an nasty warning from Firefox strongly recommending I not open it. I seem to remember this link from another class, and I opened back then anyway, and I think I clicked on a link inside of it and got a ransomware window open up in Firefox. I closed the window and nothing else bad happened. It was either a fake, or it had been neutralized by some means I do not understand. Anyway, does anybody else get the same result and do you know what that was all about? I am past the age where I feel like messing with it. At least not without some coaching.

POSTED BY: Carl Hahn
Phil Earnhardt
Phil Earnhardt
Posted 2 years ago

At the end of the Day 5 notes there is a link to Mathematica Programming: An Advanced Introduction by Leonid Shifrin When I click on it, I get an nasty warning from Firefox strongly recommending I not open it. [...] Anyway, does anybody else get the same result and do you know what that was all about? I am past the age where I feel like messing with it. At least not without some coaching.

Like most websites these days, the website mathprogramming-intro.org uses https -- public key encryption -- for connections to the site. The certificate for the site is bad; that's why Firefox is complaining. If you were brave/foolish and overrode the key mismatch, you'd still get a 404 error anyhow.

You can get to the website's contents by referencing through a snapshot in The Internet Archive: paste

https://www.mathprogramming-intro.org

into the URL form on https://archive.org , and pick a snapshot from the list. Or just click on a snapshot of the site that I already found there. Your choice. IMHO, everybody should know how to use The Internet Archive: it gives you a way to get to stuff that isn't available where it should be right now. The course admins may want to put an internet-archive snapshot URL in the course materials in case anyone else goes looking for this book online.
POSTED BY: Phil Earnhardt

I'll update the notebook with a link to the PDF before Friday's lecture. The issue as I understand it is that Leonid is unable to pay for hosting due to US sanctions on Russian banks, so his lovely book is a victim of that. (I have permission from him to share my copy of the PDF freely to students.)
POSTED BY: Arben Kalziqi

Hi folks! Sorry about the BigMarker issues today—we're looking into whether we can maybe turn down the streaming bitrate slightly or something like that so that people experience fewer dropouts on their end.

Also, Oliver said that somebody notes that the notebook they downloaded for today didn't have all of the material that was in my version of the notebook. I downloaded this notebook from the same source that is linked to attendees in chat, I'm quite sure, so I was hoping that that person might see this and offer some clarification so I can help out!
POSTED BY: Arben Kalziqi

I wanted to add an important note here:

This study group is open to everybody, but it's also intended to serve as a well-paced introduction to Wolfram Langauge for students at our upcoming Data Science Boot Camp, which starts right after this study group concludes. The intention here is that Boot Camp attendees will be able to get a thorough introduction to the language itself before Camp actually starts, leaving them in a better position to jump into the more explicitly data science-related lectures and activities.
POSTED BY: Arben Kalziqi
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