Materials for a 2 hour introduction to using Python for economics hosted for students at the Graduate Center CUNY.
In this workshop, we will not have time to help participants reach a high level of profiency in using Python, instead, our goal is to
- Give a brief introduction to Python and familiarize participants with the language syntax
- Explain why we think Python is a strong choice for solving economic problems
- Demonstrate Python's capabilities via example
In order to follow along, you will need access to a working Python installation with the necessary packages. There are two ways to achieve this:
- You can install Python on your own laptop. We recommend installing the Anaconda distribution of Python which includes many of the scientific libraries we need -- To do this, you should be able to follow instructions on the QE Lecture Site
- Compute Canada and the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences host a public cloud that has all of the scientific libraries we need installed on the cloud. This is a great option if you are unsure whether you want to use Python and don't want to spend time installing it on your own computer until you know more. One caveat here is that you will receive a limited amount of resources from this public service, so it will not necessarily be a long term solution. If you are interested in this route, you should sign in with a Google account at https://pims.syzygy.ca.
Once you have either installed Python or logged into the public cloud service, you should download these materials. If you're doing this on your own computer, you can get them from https://github.com/QuantEcon/GC_CUNY_workshop_2019. If you're doing this on the PIMS cloud service, you can do this by going to the following link in your browser https://pims.syzygy.ca/jupyter/user-redirect/git-pull?repo=https://github.com/QuantEcon/GC_CUNY_workshop_2019