MATH2071 - Numerical Methods in Scientific Computing II

MATH 2071 is a graduate level introduction to Numerical Analysis and includes both lecture and laboratory sessions.

The instructor for this class is Professor Catalin Trenchea. He will present the lectures for the course.

Dr. Kim Wong (kimwong@pitt.edu) will be conducting the lab section of the class, from 4:20 to 5:35, Monday and Wednesday, in the computer lab Posvar 1200A. 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.

Office Hours:

Fridays 1:30-2:30PM
Schenley Place, Suite 312B
Google Maps
You can also make an appointment to meet me outside of this time.

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:

These are excellents texts that you may be able to borrow 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 with some toolboxes is available for about $100 as well as a version of Matlab alone for about $50. Pitt also offers a complete student version of Matlab including toolboxes available for free for students to download and install on their personal computers.

The full set of manuals is on the web at http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc and the manuals are available in Adobe PDF format as well. You may have to create and account and log in to access these documents. 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 at http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/getting-started-with-matlab.html . This manual is also availabe in PDF format as is the full reference manual as well as manuals for each of the many toolboxes.

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 programs 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 such as Microsoft Word to prepare the summary report. In addition to these files, I require 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", "D" 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.

Each lab is due before 11:59 PM the day the subsequent lab begins. Labs submitted after the day the subsequent lab begins will have 1% deducted from the percentage grade for that lab.

If you are unable to complete a lab by its due date, you may take additional time to complete the lab, provided you attend each lab session until you have completed and submitted the work. In that case, 2% will be deducted from that lab's grade for the first week it is late (total of 3%), 3% for the second week (total of 6%), etc. If you do not attend each lab session until you submit your work, you will be given a grade of zero for that lab. Attending lab sessions offers the opportunity to resolve any questions you might have.

Table of contents of labs

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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