Modeling and Simulation in Python: Use Computation to Predict and Explain the World

This book is a thorough but easy-to-follow introduction to physical modeling—that is, the art of describing and simulating real-world systems.

Readers are guided through modeling things like world population growth, infectious disease, bungee jumping, baseball flight trajectories, celestial mechanics, and more while simultaneously developing a strong understanding of fundamental programming concepts like loops, vectors, and functions.

Clear and concise, with a focus on learning by doing, the author spares the reader abstract, theoretical complexities and gets right to hands-on examples that show how to produce useful models and simulations.

Taking a computational approach makes it possible to work with more realistic models than what you typically see in a first-year physics class, with the option to include features like friction and drag.

Python is an ideal programming language for this material. It is a good first language for people who have not programmed before, and it provides high-level data structures that are well-suited to express solutions to the problems we are interested in.