Numerical Methods I

CS 357

Numerical methods play an increasingly important role in a wide variety of engineering and physical sciences. In past decades, to test the efficiency of a new aircraft design, an expensive physical prototype had to be built and flown; now, an aerospace engineer can perform this test with an accurate simulation on her laptop.

This course introduces the fundamentals of scientific computing and numerical methods, with theoretical algorithms supplemented with hands-on programming exercises. Numerical simulations are only useful when they are accurate and reliable; hence we will learn how to understand the error in scientific computing, particularly the effects of representing real numbers with a finite amount of memory in the form of floating-point numbers. This is just as important as the understanding of the algorithms themselves!