Programming for Engineers with Mathematica

Author : John Browne, School of Engineering and Science, Swinburne University of Technology
Publication Date : October 2001

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Document Excerpts:

The Programming for Engineers course is taught to mechanical engineers in the second year of their degree program at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. The programming is taught using the inbuilt programming language of Mathematica.

The aims of the course are to understand different high-level programming paradigms useful for modeling engineering systems and to be able to create and document computational models for the exploration, design and optimization of engineering systems.

For Robotics and Mechatronics and Electronics engineers, it is easily agreed that they need to know how to program in C, since they will be involved in programming interfaces to hardware at a low level. But for mechanical, civil and chemical engineering, curriculum designers have in the past oscillated from Fortran to Pascal to Basic to C. Mathematica incorporates all much needed programming features of these languages plus a lot more.

Engineers have special purpose software for special jobs. However, what was needed was a high-level programming / computation / graphics / documentation environment in which professionals could prototype their ideas and computations; create packages encapsulating their algorithms and make them easily available to their colleagues, perhaps in another country, and perhaps only as an email attachment. This document shows the students on how to achieve these goals using Mathematica.

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