A blog of Python-related topics and code.
The following code simulates (very approximately) the growth of a polycrystal from a number of seeds. Atoms are added to the crystal lattice of each of the resulting grains until no more will fit, creating realistic-looking boundaries where two grains meet. Two sorts of lattice …
The most feasible nuclear reaction for a "first-generation" fusion reaction is the one involving deuterium (D) and tritium (T): Tritium is not a primary fuel and does not exist in significant quantities naturally since it decays with a half life of 12.3 years. It therefore …
The population dynamics simulation known as Wa-Tor was described in a previous post. When carried out on a grid with periodic boundary conditions, the Wa-Tor "universe" is topologically equivalent to a torus, as depicted below using the code provided here.
An example in Chapter 7 of the scipython book describes the numerical solution of the two-dimensional heat equation for a flat plate with edges held at a fixed temperature. The code below extends this example by considering the solution of the heat equation on the …
The code below, torus.py, defines a class Torus for drawing an SVG image of a torus. The Torus class itself is a subclass of Shape, a more general class for depicting 3D objects in an SVG image, defined in shape.py. A usage example is given …
The scipy.optimize.curve_fit routine can be used to fit two-dimensional data, but the fitted data (the ydata argument) must be repacked as a one-dimensional array first. The independent variable (the xdata argument) must then be an array of shape (2,M) where M is the total number …
As described in the previous blog post charged particle moving in crossed constant magnetic and electric fields exhibits a drift velocity, , perpendicular to both and . The particle's trajectory in this situation can be found analytically. For an arbitrary , some kind of numerical …
A charged particle moving in an electromagnetic field exhibits a "drift" in addition to its gyromotion and any acceleration due to a component of the electric field parallel to the magnetic field. This drift motion has velocity and is therefore known as the drift. In …
SVG may not be the most obvious choice for depicting a 3-D object, but with some care over the perspective and ordering of the plotted points, it can be done. The code is below and relies on a single import for the colour scheme, palettes.py, …
This is a simple Python function to generate a clock face indicating a specified time. It can be used in the script below to generate 1, 2, 4 or 6 faces indicating random times to teach children how to tell the time. Run this script …
