Teaching

One of my major and most rewarding interests the last 10+ years is the integration of programming and simulation in basic science education. This effort is a contribution to the University's famous, multi-award winning Computing in Science Education project.

Traditionally, science courses with much use of mathematical models applied pen and papir techniques to solve the mathematical problems. This is still so in most courses in the world. At the University of Oslo, however, we try to use the computer to help us with the mathematics, because this is the way one does mathematics today in industry and research. Students learn to program and solve mathematical problems through programming from day 1 in the course INF1100 Introduction to programming with scientific applications based on my book A Primer on Scientific Programming with Python. Later science courses follow up with real-world problem solving through programming. For example, our multi-variate calculus and linear algebra courses in mathematics are fully integrated with numerical methods and programming. While most other universities utilize computer-based mathematical methods at the master's or Ph.D. levels, we offer a unique computational approach from the very beginning of the bachelor studies.