CS 421 Numerical Analysis

Computer Science Department
Cornell University
Fall 1999

Office Hour for Final: Thursday, Dec. 9 : 8:00am - 11:00am; Friday, Dec. 10 : 1:00pm - 3:00pm; Monday, Dec. 13: 2:00pm - 3:00pm, 647 Rhodes Hall.

When working in floating point arithmetic even simple addition becomes complicated. For example, it is no longer associative. This means that the result of a series of additions will depend in general on the order in which these additions are made. It turns out that in the finite precision world of floating point arithmetic many mathematically correct sequences of computations can lead to very incorrect results. Despite this, people have managed to send rockets to other planets and they have obtained reliable results when studying the structure of DNA. How is this done? We will show you here!

The purpose of this course is to study some of the basic principles of numerical analysis, especially as applied to the solution of systems of equations, both linear and nonlinear. The emphasis will be on the understanding of the fundamental algorithmic ideas underlying modern practical methods.

You can also download the course information sheet (Postscript, PDF).

Course Staff

Professor: Thomas F. Coleman ( coleman@tc.cornell.edu).
647 Rhodes Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
Office Hours: Mondays from 2:30 to 3:30pm, in 647 Rhodes Hall .

Some lectures will be given by Tibor Jánosi ( janosi@cs.cornell.edu ).

Teaching Assistant: Changhong He ( hech@cam.cornell.edu ).
Office hours: Thursdays from 2:30 to 4:30pm, in 657 Rhodes Hall.

Course Materials

Books on reserve

Useful Links

  • A practical introduction to Matlab (HTML, Postscript).
  • Netlib is a huge collection of mathematical software, papers, and databases.

    About Postscript and PDF

    Both Postscript and PDF are specialized languages for describing printable documents. Postscript is the older one, and it has traditionally been used to distribute electronic versions of mathematical texts.

    Readers for both formats are available for several operating systems and platforms. You can learn more about Postscript here. PDF stands for "Portable Document Format" and it has been developed by Adobe. You can get free readers from their website.

    Note that if you download and install Ghostscript you get both a Postscript and PDF reader.

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