May 09 Because of misgrading problem 4 in HW12 which leads to 5 points were taken off, now the total score for this HW is 95 instead of 100, with 5 extra credits.

May 09 All grades are posted.

May 7 In preparation for Friday's review session, you may want to take an independent look at the sample problems that will be worked through. They are:

    Consider the four points: (-2, -1), (0, 0), (1, 2) and (3, 1).

• What is the first degree spline that interpolates these points?
• What is the second degree spline that interpolates these points and that has zero first derivative at the first point?
• What is the Subbotin quadratic spline that has knots at x={-2, 0, 1, 3}, and that takes the values y={-1, 1/2, 1, 3/2, 1} at the five nodes defined by these four knots?
• What is the natural cubic spline that interpolates these points?
• What is the parametric cubic Bezier spline defined by these points, if P₀ = (-2, -1), P₁ = (0, 0), P₂ = (1, 2), and P₃ = (3, 1)?
• What is the parametric uniform approximating cubic B-spline defined by these points, if P₀ = (-2, -1), P₁ = (0, 0), P₂ = (1, 2), and P₃ = (3, 1)?

May 2 A copy of the slides I showed in class on Friday are posted under the notes link.

May 2 Many of you have asked about how the final letter grades in this class will be determined from the final numerical scores. It varies from year to year, but what I try to do is to end up with something that seems fair. I begin with considering the possibility that scores between 90-100 = {A or A-}, 80-90 = {B-, B, B+}, etc. but then I reserve the option to revise the cutoffs downwards when necessary. Of course the circumstances vary for different terms, but you can get some idea of how this works in general from the graph below which shows the final numerical scores and the letter grades that corresponded to them from the last time I taught csci2031 in Spring 2005. I have to stress that I won't be using this particular mapping this term - for example, just because an 80 was an A in 2005 it doesn't mean that an 80 will be an A in 2008; many things were different last time - but I expect to use a similar process to get a similar distribution of letter grades.

Apr 30 Here are some plots of the grades on the first and second midterms, as well as the homework averages, minus the two lowest scores, up through hw7:

Apr 28 Second midterm grades have been posted.

Apr 21 HW10 grades have been posted.

Apr 07 HW8 grades have been posted.

Apr 01 HW7 grades have been posted.

Apr 01 An abbreviated assignment #9 has been posted and will be due on Monday 4/6.

Mar 26 Some of you have come to me with questions about computing lower and upper sums. I wanted to bring to your attention a nice interactive demo on lower and upper sums that exists at this website (http://www.geogebra.org/en/examples/integral/loweruppersum.html). It might help clarify the concept for any of you who are still uncertain about it. The main thing to remember is that even though all of the worked examples in our textbook estimated integrals of functions that were monotonically increasing or monotonically decreasing, this is not the general case - meaning that in general in some intervals an arbitrary function will have a lower or upper bound at a point that is not one of the interval endpoints. Question 2 on this week's homework assignment attempts to draw your attention to this feature of lower and upper sums.

Mar 19 HW6 grades have been posted.

Mar 11 First midterm grades have been posted.

Mar 06 HW5 grades have been up online. If any discrepancy, please contact TA Guoquan.

Mar 05 I have posted some notes (on the notes page) to help clarify two of the topics we didn't have time to adequately cover in lecture on March 5th.

Feb 27 HW4 grades have been up online. If any discrepancy, please contact TA Guoquan.

Feb 23 HW3 grades have been up online. If any discrepancy, please contact TA Guoquan.

Feb 13 HW2 grades have been up online. If any discrepancy, please contact TA Guoquan.

Feb 10 HW1 grades have been up online. If any discrepancy, please contact TA Guoquan.

Jan 28 TA Guoquan's office hour on Tuesday (Jan 29) is cancelled due to medical emergency.

Jan 24 Today's recitation notes have been posted here: Matlab Tutorial

Jan 24 The student version of Matlab can be obtained from ITLabs http://www.itlabs.umn.edu/

Jan 22 Check out the link of the textbook http://rene.ma.utexas.edu/CNA/NMC6/

Dec 28 Welcome to CSci 2031, Introduction to Numerical Computing. Be sure to check out the other pages listed on the menu bar. These will be updated as information becomes available.

Students should get an ITLabs computer account for Spring semester 2008 before attending the first lecture, if possible.  This can be done online at http://www.itlabs.umn.edu/.