Department of Computer Science and Technology

Course pages 2017–18

Numerical Methods

Lecture Notes

  • Copies of slides as printed: PDF 190 PAGES

  • Copies of slides with corrections, additional images and large-font expansions: PDF.

  • Learners' Guide LINK This expands each syllabus point and topic to a paragraph or two. This gives narrative structure to the course and better sets out what you are supposed to take away from each topic. It also has a section on what material was not lectured or is not examinable.

Practical Materials

New: DEMO FOLDER COMMENTRY.

Note: The Simpson's Rule demo was recently added, so you may want to do a "git commit -a; git pull" or whatever the mouse-driven equivalent is.

  • Practicals and Demos folder: A folder containing short demonstration programs illustrating various aspects. They are mainly available in both ML and Java, but one or two are in C or C# as well. Folder location: https://bitbucket.org/djg11/numerical-methods-demos/src.
    At the command line you can get an initial, local copy of this folder using
        git clone https:[Javascript required]/djg11/numerical-methods-demos.git
    
    And any updates can then be fetched using
    git pull
    .

Please also look at the reference materials on the course page from two year's ago.

Exercise/Example Sheets

Example Sheet 1, 2 and 3 (all in same file) PDF.

Additional Materials

In general, the additional materials are for further study beyond what is on the examinable syllabus.

New for 2018:

  • Beating Floating Point at its Own Game: Posit Arithmetic. John L. Gustafson and Isaac Yonemoto. PDF.

  • Real-world implementations of three scientific functions. We lectured applying a Taylor expansion to a range-reduced argument. We mentioned using changes to the coefficients on a Chebychev basis so that error is better spread out or minimised. But where a Taylor expansion has alternating signs, monotonicity is not guaranteed and so that approach should be avoided. These real-world examples, coded in C, are for private study and are certainly not examinable. FOLDER.

Other relevant materials are on previous years' pages.



Last year’s course materials are still available.