Course pages 2014–15
Numerical Methods
- Projected Slides Rev P5 - the extended slide pack with additional asides: PDF.
- (Slides as printed Rev0: PDF 198 pages).
- Demos folder:
A folder containing short demonstation programs illustrating various aspects.
The programs will be added just before the lecture that uses them.
They are mainly available in both ML and Java, but one or two are in C as well.
Folder location: https://bitbucket.org/djg11/numerical-methods-demos/src.
At the command line you can get a local copy of this folder usinggit clone https://djg11@bitbucket.org/djg11/numerical-methods-demos.git
And the updates can then be fetched usinggit pull
.
Learners' Guide - explaining what you should take away and what you are not expected to know in detail CURRENT VERSION HERE.
Examples Sheets:
- Examples Sheet numbers 1, 2 and 3 PDF.
Audio Recordings - I have recorded many of the later lectures. The audio files are now being placed in this folder in reverse order.
Secondary Materials
Numerical Analysis is the oldest discipline in Computer Science. You will find many dusty books in your College library covering the subject. These will contain relevant chapters. Also, Wikipedia explains all of the topics we shall cover.
The following web resources will be referred to in lectures.
- Disasters: Some disasters caused by numerical errors: Kees Vuik's page, Two disasters, The sinking of the Sleipner A offshore platform.
- Mike O'Donohoe's notes for a previous course with a different syllabus
- Notes for Numerical Analysis Math 4445 by S. Adjerid
- IEEE 754.
- Same numbers in, different sums out! - an article on whether a mySQL database can be trusted to add up a column of figures.
- Hackers Delight .
- Ken Shirriff's blog Sinclair Calculator (URL updated).
- Interpolations with and without Chebychev knot spacing.
- CORDIC.
- Chris Lomont's Inverse Square .
- The MONIAC water-based computer.
- A lecture note on L/U Decomposition (McMasters/Kirbua).
- The problem with percentiles - topic not covered this year.
- List of optimisation software - topic not covered this year..
- The Logistic Map.
- Kahan Summation algorithm.
- An interesting iteration to find Pi.
- Wolfram Blume, Byte Magazine 1986, SPICE: Computer Circuit Simulation.
Further Material
- Resources for Michael Overton's book "Numerical Computing with IEEE Floating Point Arithmetic"
- An easy magazine article by Cleve Moler (The Mathworks, creators of MATLAB) conveying the feel of various ideas from this course.
- Annotated subset of past exam questions for an older Numerical Analysis course.
- Nick Maclaren's course "How Computers Handle Numbers – a.k.a. Computer Arithmetic Uncovered" for the Computing Service.
- Some further books:
- Numerical analysis : mathematics of scientific computing / David Kincaid, Ward Cheney. 2009.
- Handbook of floating-point arithmetic / Jean-Michel Muller ... [et al.]. 2010.
- Numerical Recipes in Fortran/C/Java/Younameit, William H. Press: http://www.nr.com.
- Inside SPICE by Ron Kielkowski - McGraw Hill 1993.
For the more adventurous:
- David Goldberg's article "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic"
- David Monniaux's article "The pitfalls of verifying floating-point computations"
- Batching for percentiles.