Digital Medicine I: Introduction to Programming

Abstract

This lecture gives an introduction to programming in Python and an overview of basic problem solving strategies and design principles for efficient algorithms and data structures.

Objective

To learn basic principles of programming in Python and to apply them for implementing algorithmic approaches for solving simple computational problems.

Content

This lecture has two goals. On the one hand, an introduction to programming is given, using Python as a sample language. This introduction includes the basic programming principles such as truth values, variables, data types, conditional statements, loops, and functions. On the other hand, basic data structures (like stacks, queues, or search trees) and important concepts of algorithm design are presented and implemented in Python to efficiently solve basic algorithmic tasks on these data structures. The main focus lies on general-purpose design techniques for efficient algorithms, such as the greedy method, dynamic programming, or the divide and conquer strategy. These techniques are demonstrated with many examples from practice.

Resources