MATH2070 - Numerical Methods in Scientific Computing I

MATH 2070 is a graduate level introduction to Numerical Analysis and includes both lecture and laboratory sessions.

The instructor for this class is Professor Michael Neilan. He will present the lectures for the course.

Dr. Mike Sussman will be conducting the lab section of the class, from 4:20 to 5:35, Monday and Wednesday, in the computer lab GSCC 126. The topics and assignments for each lab are listed in the online schedule. Each lab assignment is due by the beginning of the following lab. Labs will be submitted via email and each submission will be confirmed by return email.

The textbook for this course is

Quarteroni, A., Sacco, R., Saleri, F.
Numerical Mathematics (Second Edition), Springer
ISBN:3-540-34658-9

Textbooks used in recent years include:

you may be able to borrow them from another student.

The labs are conducted using Matlab, a program produced by The MathWorks. The Matlab language is, in fact, an object-oriented programming language with an extensive library of mathematical and scientific function calls entirely built-in. A full-featured student version of Matlab is available for about $100 at the Pitt Bookstore. Pitt also has a full-featured version of Matlab available for free for students to download and install on their personal computers. The difference is that the $100 student version does not expire while the free version must be renewed each year, and you get no printed manuals with the free version. In addition, the $100 version has none of the toolboxes while the free version has them all.

The full set of manuals is on the web in html and also in Adobe PDF format. These same pages are also available locally on the computers in the lab by using the Help facility. The "Getting Started" manual is a good place to begin. It is easy to read and provides an excellent introduction. It is available both in html (web) format and Adobe PDF format. The full reference manual as well as manuals for each of the many toolboxes are all available. Warning: The manuals on the web are for the latest version, 2012a, of Matlab, but the version available on the computers in GSCC is 6.5 (would be 2003 in the current numbering system). Most of the Matlab features discussed in the labs are identical between these versions, but there are features available in the newer versions that are not available in the older one.

There is a freely available program called Octave that is a clone of a subset of Matlab. It provides only the core mathematical capabilities of Matlab, with limited toolboxes, but it is sufficient for this course. If you are interested in using it on your personal computer, see me.

Objective:

The objective of the lab work is to familiarize you with implementation of numerical methods using Matlab. Knowledge of Matlab is not a prerequesite of the course, and all the relevant features of Matlab will be explained in the text of the labs. Because of the focus on numerical methods, neither the toolboxes nor many capabilities of Matlab will be covered. Instead, numerical methods will be implemented and tested using Matlab functions and scripts.

Students who have never written functions or scripts may find the discussion in the labs overly terse. There are many resources on the web for beginning programmers, and a student who needs more detailed instruction should seek them out. In addition, there is an excellent textbook:

Charles F. Van Loan and K.-Y. Daisy Fan
Insight Through Computing, A MATLAB Introduction to Computational Science and Engineering, SIAM
ISBN: 978-0-898716-91-7

Grading:

You will be graded on the contents of a summary report describing your results for the exercises in the labs. This report can be in the form of a text file, with supplemental files for plots and source (Matlab m-files) when required. If you prefer, you can use a word processor to prepare the summary report. In addition to these files, I need your "diary" file. The summary report and accompanying files should not require a large investment in time beyond that needed to complete the labs.

I will grade each lab either "A+", "A", "B", "C", or 0. These letter grades can be described in the following manner:

At the end of the course, I will use these grades to provide a laboratory grade to Prof. Neilan, who will use it for approximately 30% of your overall grade. Since omitted labs count as zero, they will seriously impact your grade, so a late submission is greatly preferred over skipping a lab. Grades for each lab submitted late will be decremented approximately 1% when the due date is passed and an additional 1% per week.

There are ten labs, each taking several class sessions.

Students with disabilities

If you have a disability for which you are or may be requesting an accommodation, you are encouraged to contact both your instructor and Disability Resources and Services, 140 William Pitt Union, 412-648-7890 or 412-383-7355 (TTY) as early as possible in the term. DRS will verify your disability and determine reasonable accommodations for this course.

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Last revised on $Date: 2012/10/01 00:01:30 $.