Has anyone taken CS 4210/Math 4250, what is it like in comparison to ENGRD 3220?
I took 3220, Intro to scientific computing, this past semester and thoroughly enjoyed the course (I think it's that mixture of calc and cs that did it for me). I'm planning to take the differential equations side of the numerical analysis course in fulfillment of my computational science vector. I've tried googling the course, but can't come up with any of the class websites from past years to give me a hint of what I'm getting into. Has anyone taken cs4210/math4250 before, and if so, what was it like?
Okay, I dug around a little on blackboard and to my pleasant surprise, the problem sets and handouts from last fall were all there. Overall, it seems like the standard stuff you'd expect. The first half of the course (according to the assignments) is dedicated to the tools of trade for numerical analysis, if you've taken a bit of analysis or any of the techie math courses, you should be able to do the problem sets already. Topics include floating point traps and workarounds, convergence analysis, general flavored polynomiall interpolation methods plus specialized ones like B-splines, divided differences and higher ordered approximations of derivatives, and composite quadratures to approximate integrals.
The latter part of the course applies quadratures into implicit integrands representing systems of ODEs, higher order composite solvers like RK-n, and pairwise solvers, and a lot of analysis based problems. If you're comfortable with linear algebra, diffeq/calc, or you've taken another analysis or numerical methods course, you should be comfortable with the problem sets and the exams in this course too.
nah man I got completely swamped with other sh it second sem, so I didnt have time (but I did go to the practices first sem). I'm pretty rusty too from high school, haven't really done much lately. I've been contemplating whether to sign up for woot or not to get back on track, but I honestly don't think I'll have enough time (28+cr next sem). Well the median score is a 0 or something like that, so most people don't feel too comfortable with the problems, and whatever elementary number theory I remember from hs has been getting me through the diophantines that show up from time to time, so I don't think you need to know too much to be able to use it haha.
yeah the guy's crazy. I remember we were working through a nonlinear differential equation problem w/ no elegant elementary solution that professor bach wasn't quite sure how to solve and hubbard went up to the board, stared for a bit and then started explaining it, pretty sure at one point i remember him comparing it briefly to a fish that had broken through a certain channel and would inevitably be trapped until equilibrium.
