FEM with Python

FEM with Python is a collection of course notes, assignments, projects, etc. that I developed for teaching an introductory course on the Finite Element Method at the University of Utah. As the name implies, materials are targeted for learning the finite element method using the Python programming language.

All course materials are licensed under the MIT License:

Copyright (c) 2014 Tim Fuller

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Course materials are written and distributed as IPython notebooks and can be viewed online at NBViewer

All course materials require a Python distribution with the numpy, scipy, matplotlib, traits, and chaco packages installed. You can try to install each of these packages on your systems standard Python distribution (not recommended), or download and install the Anaconda Community Edition of Python or Enthought Canopy.

Course materials are maintained under version control using git.

According to Wikepedia,

Git is a distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) system with an emphasis on speed. Git was initially designed and developed by Linus Torvalds for Linux kernel development in 2005.

There are several ways to obtain course materials

Mac OS X and Linux have git installed out of the box. On Windows, binary installers are available at http://msysgit.github.com/.

Once git is installed, obtain class materials by opening a terminal session (command prompt) and navigating to the directory you would like the materials to reside. There, execute

git clone https://github.com/tjfulle/fem-with-python

You now have full access to all course materials.

If you don't have git installed and don't want to install it, you can simply download the course materials by clicking on the Download ZIP button at https://github.com/tjfulle/fem-with-python. Note, if you do this, you cannot update using git pull as described below and must re-download when new materials are published.

As course materials are updated, you can obtain the updates by simply navigating to the directory where the materials are already cloned and executing

git pull