A First Look at Coding in Chemistry (Solving Problems Using MATLAB)

Do you have a project that requires some coding skills and don’t know where to start? Are you fitting a curve to your experimental data and need tools to help? Trying coding to solve maths problems in chemistry for the first time? This book will uncover all the help you need to apply these skills.

Focusing on developing basic coding skills in chemistry, this concise introductory text takes a problem-based approach and is organized in a workbook style for helping those new to programming. Discussions on coding are viewed from a chemistry perspective and embedded in solving problems familiar to most first-year undergraduate chemistry students. While primarily building programming and broadly-applicable related skills, some topics in data analysis and presentation, uncertainties in measurements, and areas of mathematics relevant to these and chemistry are also briefly surveyed.

After quick overviews of coding in chemistry and the MATLAB language and programming environment, the basics of assigning variables and arrays are introduced. Writing simple scripts and functions, step-by-step through chemistry and environmental chemistry examples, is then employed to present scientific data. Coding skills are further developed in the next set of chapters while fitting curves to experimental data and handling measurement uncertainties. Using coding to organise information in chemistry representing various types of transformations, spatial effects and interactions is covered in the chapters on vectors and matrices. Next, user-defined functions are utilized to predict the concentrations of chemicals during reactions, before looking into developing code for enhanced workflows that allow computers to make decisions while executing programs. In the final two chapters, coding is extended to tackling common maths problems in chemistry including unit algebra, rearranging expressions, solving equations, differentiation and integration.