Introduction to Python Programming and Self-Study: A Continuum Mechanics Perspective

Continuum mechanics is a general-purpose tool to mathematically modeling physical phenomena around us. From a pulsating heart to the conformation of a glowing-red steel shaft, continuum mechanics is the broader framework to translate physical principles into differential equations. Due to the difficulty to finding analytical solutions to such differential equations, numerical methods have been proposed, with special attention to the finite element method (FEM). Numerical methods, such as the FEM, require computational effort and, thus, implementation using a programming language. In the past two decades, the \textit{python} programming language has become widely used in the community of continuum mechanics, both for scientists and practitioners. There is a plethora of widely known and used modules and libraries in python, such as FEniCS for the FEM, GMSH for mesh generation, and TensorFlow for machine learning. This booklet presents basic python concepts and syntax intricacies to introduce the reader into the minimally necessary programming skills to translate continuum mechanics problems into python code and, from it, prospect results. The approach of this booklet is centered around brief conceptual presentation alongside programming examples mainly within FEM applications.