This is intended as an example to demonstrate the use of overloading in object
oriented programming. This was written as a Jupyter notebook (aka IPython) in
Python 3. To run in Python 2, simply rename the variables that have unicode
names, and replace truediv with div.
While there are several nice Python libraries that support uncertainty (for example, the powerful uncertainties package and the related units and uncertainties package pint), they usually use standard error combination rules. For a beginning physics class, often ‘maximum error’ combination is used. Here, instead of using a standard deviation based error and using combination rules based on uncorrelated statistical distributions, we assume a simple maximum error and simply add errors.
To implement this, let’s build a Python class and use overloading to implement algebraic operations.
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