Lecture 1.
Introduction.
The first lecture of CISC-271 will be used for
introductions.
The agenda is
roughly:
Administration
Course
organization and administration, homeworks, tests, grading
scheme.
Introduction to
Scientific Computing
We will be using
Matlab in this course. I gave a very brief demonstration using the first few
pages of NCM by Moler to illustrate some of the things that can be done with
Matlab. I went through the operations rather quickly so it may have been a bit
difficult to follow. I suggest that you try this on your to explore.
One of the most useful instructions in
Matlab is 'help'. In our class today we used a Matlab function called roots as
follows:
EDU>> p = [1 -1
-1]
p
=
1 -1
-1
EDU>> r =
roots(p)
r
=
-0.61803398874989
1.61803398874989
One way to get some
idea of what happened is to type 'help roots' as is illustrated
below:
EDU>> help
roots
ROOTS Find polynomial
roots.
ROOTS(C) computes the roots of the
polynomial whose coefficients
are the
elements of the vector C. If C has N+1
components,
the polynomial is C(1)*X^N +
... + C(N)*X + C(N+1).
Class support for input c:
float: double,
single
See also poly, residue, fzero.
Reference page in Help browser
doc
roots
You can use 'help' in the same
way on any Matlab function. Much more about this will be discussed on Thursday
and throughout the term.
Posted: Fri - September 2, 2005 at 10:55 AM