Let me reprise my spiel at the organizational meeting on Monday to tell you what ph20 will not (or not quite) be about:

• physics, although all of your assignments will be concerned with simple problems in this discipline;

• computer languages, although you will use them extensively and perhaps learn new ones;

• numerical methods, although you will leave with some of their basics, and with the capacity of digging out and using much more advanced information about them.

Instead, this lab is about finding an efficient, harmonious, and fun way (a modus operandi, if you wish) of bringing together these three elements, the ideas of physics, the tools of computer science, and the methods of numerical analysis.

In this lab, you start discovering a productive and enjoyable way for you to use computers to do quantitative science; later in your career you will find that you have built up a toolbox of tools and techniques with which you are comfortable, and that can be useful in many occasions. Just which particular tools and techniques you have acquired will depend partly on contingency (such as your taste and mine), but nevertheless they will suit your style of doing computations, and they will serve you well.

In this lab, the underlying current in your adapting to new tools and developing your style of doing computation will be the pursuit beauty: beauty in physics, in the graphical presentation of information, and in programming. In all three, beauty is synonymous with clarity, economy, power, efficiency, generality:

• in physics (and especially in theoretical physics), beauty has been a guiding principle for the development of more and more general, economical, and powerful theories;

• in the graphical display of information, beautiful graphs and tables display data with clarity and economy, emphasize important trends and features, and encourage statistical and mathematical inference;

• in programming, beauty serves as the first line of defense from complexity and from bugs: beautiful languages and codes manifest the parallelism between a program and its mathematical and physical content; ugly languages and codes hide it and provide a breeding ground for inconsistencies and inefficiencies.

Thus, this week I am giving you three short readings about beauty in these three areas.

The first is //Beauty and the quest for beauty in science// (Physics Today, July 1979, p. 25) by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. This is a short lecture on the topic that Chandrasekhar would later write up in the charming Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science (Univ. of Chicago, 1987).

The second is a review in Salon magazine of Edward Tufte's books on displaying information. Tufte's books are considered seminal contributions to the theory and practice of statistical (and to some extent, physical) graphing. Later in the course we will consider in detail at some of Tufte's lessons; for the moment I wanted to give you an idea of why beautiful graphics is important. We have two of Tufte's books in the lab; you are encouraged to start browsing them. Tufte's website is also a good resource that you might enjoy exploring.

The last is an excerpt (also handed out in class) from ''Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology'' by David Gelernter on the importance of beauty in computer languages and programs. Disregard the part about the special status of human minds, which reads a bit like a rant. Read a bit at random or imagine what it might say without looking at it.

Who is Guido van Rossum (Q5?)? And who ever said that the readings and the assignments would actually agree? Guido van Rossum created Python. He also wrote about his lovely invention from time to time. This should get you started.

Optional readings (for teh lulz): The obfuscated C code contest illustrates ironically the extreme importance of writing clear code.

You are encouraged to discuss these readings with the other students in the lab and with your TA.