Math 417 -- Jean Marie Linhart -- MWF 11:30-12:20 CE 222

Instructor: Jean Marie Linhart

Office: Blocker 620G
Office Hours: Wed 1:30 - 3:00 and by appointment
Office Hours for Wed. Mar 10 cancelled, rescheduled Tuesday Mar 9, 3-4 pm
Email: jmlinhart at math dot tamu dot edu (I prefer to receive messages by email)
Phone: (979) 845-5321
Textbook required: Numerical Analysis 8th ed. by Burden and Faires.

Math 417 Laboratory -- Jia Wei -- Th 8:00-8:50 BLOC 123

Teaching Assistant: Jia Wei
Office: Blocker 610B
Office hours: Tuesday 2:00 - 3:00 pm and by appointment
Office hours for Tuesday Feb 9 cancelled, rescheduled for Wed Feb 10, 3-4:30 pm
Email: jwei at math dot tamu dot edu
Phone: (979) 862-2188
Website: http://www.math.tamu.edu/~jwei/

Prerequisites

• MATH 222, 304 or 311
• MATH 308 or equivalent
• Ability to program in C/C++ (preferred), Fortran or MATLAB

Success at Math

Class Administration

• First day handout in PDF format
• First day feedback form
• Our lists for what constitutes a good teacher/course and a good student/successful person
• Daily sign-in sheet
• When emailing include your full name and course and section as appropriate!
  • How to email your professor
  • Here are some additional email tips.

Lectures

• Please be assertive in asking questions during lecture.
• Please be assertive in paying attention in lecture.
• You are responsible for material presented in lecture.

Textbook Reading

Suggested reading and resources (in addition to your textbook)

• Wikipedia's article on Numerical Analysis
• Wikipedia on Floating Point Arithmetic
• Wolfram Alpha. Go play with this -- fun!
• Numerical Recipes in C/Fortran A very useful reference.
• The Handbook of Mathematical Functions aka the Big Blue Bible. Lots of stuff on how functions can actually be computed here, either by series solutions (think Taylor series) or by continued fractions (which are not used much in modern mathematics, so you might not be familiar with them). Many functions are now solved by Rational Chebyshev Polynomials set to get exactly double precision, but if you want to calculate to an unspecified precision, you need something like a series or a continued fraction that you can keep iterating until full precision is reached. The Handbook also has tables of many of these functions.
• The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth is a compendium of a lot of wisdom on how to get things done on a computer. Whether it is arithmetic or sorting/searching or other things. If you start to delve deeper into the subject, this is definitely a book to be aware of and take a look at. Here is some more about both Knuth and his book.
  • Wikipedia on Donald Knuth
  • Amazon.com link to boxed set of The Art of Computer Programming Books
  • Wikipedia article on the books in The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth
• Wikipedia on Big-O notation (also has a section on little-o)
• Wikipedia on the Computational Complexity of Mathematical Operations. Big-O is most often used with regards to the computation time of an algorithm. This page discusses a number of common basic mathematical operations and how long they take.
• The Steepest Descent Method Algorithm and Wikipedia's Article on Gradient Descent
• Forward and centered difference errors in comparison for the function exp(x).
• An introduction to Gaussian Quadrature. These folks have more resources on Gaussian quadrature all linked off of this page.
• Wikipedia on Gaussian Quadrature

Homework assignments and due dates

If you intend to use MATLAB for this course, you may find the following useful. These are MATLAB resources I created for Math 308:

• MATLAB setup for Math 308
• MATLAB Basics

The notecard assignment is due in class January 29, 2010. Directions

Guidelines for working together on Homework

Exams

Our midterm exam is tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, March 10, 2010.

Our final exam is Wednesday, May 12 from 10:30 am - 12:30 pm. It is in our regular classroom. The final exam is cumulative.

Extra Help

• The lab section of the course is intended to help you with the course material. Ask questions of our Teaching Assistant!
• I'm always happy to see you in my office hours, to answer questions before and after class, and to answer your questions during the lectures.

(C) 2010 Jean Marie Linhart, all rights reserved.