Note: This text should not be confused with another text
"Numerical Analysis: Mathematics of Scientific Computing" also by Kincaid and Cheney SyllabusLectures slides and homeworkOffice Hours
Tuesdays 3-5pm and Thursdays 1-3pm, or at other times by arrangement
Room 49 Fondren Science Building Homework
This is a hands-on class where you learn mostly by working on the homework exercises.
Homework assignments will be posted on the class website Thursday nights and will
be due the following Thursday night by email at 11:59pm.
I reserve the right to start the process of collating and grading the homework
submissions as early as 12:00am early Friday mornings. Once I start this process,
in fairness to the students who have submitted their emails on time,
late submissions are eligible for only 50% credit. Then once the solutions have been
posted of course no credit can be awarded for an assignment.
Some Fridays I may have other
class preparation work to do and may not start the homework grading until later
in the morning. It may be possible to slip a late assignment in these mornings
before I start to work on the submissions
and still get full credit, but this is not guaranteed. Eligibility for full credit
is only assured by sending in the assignment before midnight on Thursday night.
Programming Tools
The Linux lab computer systems in the Physics department
and its gcc Gnu C compiler will be available to students
to develop numerical analysis programs for assignments
in this course. The schedule of computer system availability is to be determined.
However, as an alternative if you have a laptop or home computer running Microsoft
Windows you may also install the MinGW gcc package to develop your C programs at
home. The MinGW project home page provides more
details and documentation on the MinGW package. To get started you may download this
Windows binary installer and follow these
step by step installation instructions.
Plotting Tool
We'll be making extensive use of the gnuplot plotting program
in this course. Refer to this manual for documentation.
This tool is a standard part of Linux systems, and is available on
the Physics department systems. For those working on class assignments at home,
it is also available for the Windows platform, and you
may download this executable
and install it as well. Installation is accomplished simply by unzipping the contents
of this archive into a convenient directory, such as 'C:\Program Files\gnuplot',
and creating a shortcut in the Start Menu for the gnuplot.exe executable file, found
in the 'C:\Program Files\gnuplot\binary' subdirectory.
Program editing
You may use any plain text editor you feel comfortable with when working on
Linux systems, such as gedit, xemacs, nedit, vim, or others,
to compose your numerical programs.
When working on Windows, the native text editor Notepad offers very limited
capability. Two good alternatives for an enhanced editor specifically designed for
program source code are the Programmers File Editor or ViM. You
may download this executable
and install PFE simply by unzipping the contents
of this archive into a convenient directory, such as 'C:\Program Files\PFE',
and creating a shortcut in the Start Menu for the PFE32.EXE executable file.
Or downloading and running this executable will give you
a Windows installer for the ViM editor.
Class Resources Linux commands bash shell key commands less pager key commands gnuplot commands Hexadecimal digits Equivalent path names in Windows and MinGW Commonly used math library functions
