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!
Resources
Schedule