R For Engineers

Super condensed tutorials for learning R and solving engineering problems.

Author

Ankit Rohatgi, ankitrohatgi@hotmail.com

Purpose

Commercial softwares such as Matlab and Mathematica are extremely popular among engineering students and faculty as they are powerful tools and often available for free to the academic community. Outside the academic world, it is often not practical to purchase these expensive commercial softwares which makes continuing to practice and improve engineering skills difficult.

R is free to use and is becoming increasingly popular in the data analysis community, but it is not very popular among engineers. Here, I wish to gather some examples and tutorials to demonstrate the capabilities of R by solving typical engineering problems and maybe even build a few simple apps.

Why R?

• Unlike Matlab, Mathematica etc., R is open source and free to use.
• R has many packages for data analysis, statistics, differential equations, plotting and so on.
• R is extremely popular and it is easy to find help on the internet.
• R is easy to learn and comes with an interactive GUI.
• R works on Windows, Linux and MacOS.
• R is generally considered to be better and easier than Python for actual data analysis.
• R is extremly flexible and powerful.

Contents

1. Basics

   1. basics.R - Basics such as declaring variables, lists, loops, functions etc.
   2. matrices.R - Working with matrices.
   3. complex.R - Complex numbers.
   4. basicCalculus.R - Integration and differentiation.
   5. ode.R - Ordinary differential equations.

2. Fluid Mechanics

   1. flowPastSphere.R - Plot fluid streamlines around a sphere in uniform stokes flow.

Following will be available soon:

6. pde.R - Partial differential equations.
7. optimization.R - Simple optimization.
8. curveFitting.R - Curve fitting.
9. interpolation.R - Interpolation.
10. distributions.R - Simple distributions.