MATH 521 Additional Online Reading List

Prof. Zachariah B. Etienne

Note 1: All links to Wikipedia reference versions of the article that have been vetted by the instructor, and may be considered trustworthy.

Note 2: This reading list should be considered as a complement to the lecture notes as well as the suggested text for this course: (Numerical Recipes, second edition or higher)

Preliminaries:

All material in MATH 521 builds on basic undergraduate mathematics, and when you start this course, I assume you are already well-versed in undergraduate mathematics.
If you need to brush up, here are some resources that may help:


Scientific Notation and Significant Figures

Review of scientific notation and significant figures

Think you're ready? Take these online quizzes:
Quiz on scientific notation #1

Quiz on scientific notation #2

Quiz on scientific notation and significant figures

Basic Algebra: Solving Nonlinear Equations and Inequalities

Involving Logarithms

Involving Exponentials and Logarithms

Quadratic Equations and Quadratic Formula

Quadratic inequalities

A worked out example of both linear and nonlinear (quartic) inequalities: Example problem, determining where strict diagonal dominance criterion is satisfied

Calculus I: Differentiation

Chain Rule Practice Quiz

Finding minima and maxima of functions

Calculus II: Integration

Integration by variable substitution

Integration by parts

Linear Algebra

Computing Determinants

Properties of Determinants

Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors

Eigenvalue/Eigenvector Worksheet, with solutions

Determining the Scale of a Problem

Fermi Problems/Back-of-the-Envelope: Roughly Estimating the Solution

Rule of 72: Useful for estimating exponential growth.

Guide to Big-O Notation

Big-O Notation: Basics

Roundoff Error, Loss of Significance

Chapter 1 of Numerical Recipes

Floating Point Arithmetic Primer

How double precision numbers are stored on the computer, and why we can expect roughly 15-16 decimal digits of precision

Notes on Loss of Significance

Notes on rewriting expressions to avoid catastrophic cancellation

Tips for determining how many digits of significance you can expect from a double-precision calculation (note that this neglects guard digits):
  1. Evaluating the expression according to proper order-of-operation, check for arithmetic steps that go out of bounds for double precision arithmetic. (Note that the smallest nonzero number is roughly plus or minus 1e-308; largest non-infinite number is roughly plus or minus 1e+308). If this happens, evaluate to zero or infinity as appropriate. You might still retain some digits of significance.
  2. Check for catastrophic cancellation.
  3. Check for numbers that are exactly representable by double precision. If these exist, they are known to an infinite number of significant digits. If not, they are generally known to only 15--16 significant digits.
  4. Dividing two numbers that are identical to all significant digits will yield one exactly.
  5. Subtracting two numbers that are identical to all significant digits will yield zero exactly.
Please contact the instructor if you would like to contribute further tips.

Example problems:
When the following expressions are evaluated by the computer, to how many significant decimal digits will the numerical result agree with the exact result? In computing the "exact result", you are to assume all numbers given are valid to infinitely many significant digits. E.g., 2.15 = 2.1500000000..... In computing the ``numerical result'', you are to assume that unless otherwise specified (e.g., ``1 is exact''), each number written below can be represented to only 16 significant digits, and that IEEE 754 standard-compliant double precision arithmetic is applied. We use computer scientific notation, such that, e.g., 5.63e12 = 5.63 x 1012. Your answer will consist of a single number (infinity is an acceptable number), and answers will be accepted so long as they are correct within 1 decimal digit.
  1. 16 - 2.355e-10 (16 is exact)
  2. 1e52 + 1e-10
  3. 1e230 / (1e-220)
  4. 1024 - 4.2e-183 (1024 is exact)
  5. 2 / (1e120 * 1e120 * 1e120) (2 is exact)
  6. (3.24e-35 - 1.2e-1) / (2.54e-256)
  7. (3e-250 + 3) (3 is exact)
  8. (3e-250 + 3) / (3e250) (3 is exact)

Function Approximation (Approximation Theory)

Taylor Series Review

Series Convergence: Ratio Test

Radius of Convergence

Using Taylor Series to compute pi (Gregory-Leibniz series; converges extremely slowly)

Fourier Series/Transforms

Chapter 12 of Numerical Recipes

Even and odd functions

Orthogonality of sines and cosines

Fourier Series; computing Fourier Series coefficients

Discussion on why Fourier Series/Transforms are so important

Fourier Convergence Theorem (to what value does Fourier Series converge?)

Periodic Functions / Fourier Convergence Theorem (to what value does Fourier Series converge?)

Gibbs Phenomenon

Discrete-Time Fourier Transform (i.e., Fourier Transform of uniformly-sampled function)

Cooley-Tukey Fast Fourier Transform (FFT; see "radix-2" case)

Polynomial Interpolation and Extrapolation

Chapter 3 of Numerical Recipes

Polynomial/Lagrange Interpolation/Extrapolation

Numerical Integration

Chapter 4 of Numerical Recipes

Trapezoidal Rule

Trapezoidal Rule Example

Simpson's Rule, with derivation

Simpson's Rule Examples

Richardson Extrapolation

Romberg Integration

Solving Linear Sets of Equations on the Computer

Chapter 2 of Numerical Recipes

Review: Gaussian Elimination

LU Decomposition, by example

LU Decomposition: Computational complexity, basic properties, pivoting to reduce roundoff error

Why do we favor the LU Decomposition over Gaussian Elimination?

Roundoff error analysis of LU Decomposition

Jacobi Method, derivation

Gauss-Seidel Method, Successive Over-Relaxation (SOR), derivation

Positive Definite Matrices

Reducible/Irreducible Matrices

Spectral Radius

Rigorous derivation of Jacobi and Gauss-Seidel, with convergence criteria

Example problem, determining where strict diagonal dominance criterion is satisfied

Detailed lecture notes on Numerical Linear Algebra (see, e.g., Chapter 5)

Root-Finding Algorithms

Chapter 9 of Numerical Recipes

Bisection Method: Pseudocode, Worked Example, Convergence Analysis

Secant Method: Basic Method, Derivation, Convergence, Comparison with False Position Method

False Position Method: Basic Algorithm, Convergence Analysis, Extensions (Illinois algorithm), Pseudocode

Newton-Raphson Method, with practical considerations

Worked Example of Newton-Raphson Method

Fixed-Point Iteration Root-Finding Method

Fixed-Point Iteration Examples

Optimization: Finding Minima and Maxima of Functions

Chapter 10 of Numerical Recipes

Golden Section Search: Motivations, Derivation

Golden Section Search: Derivation, Pseudocode

Golden Section Search: Alternative Derivation

Brent's Method for Minimization: Basic Description

Nedler-Mead Method: Description, Animations

Powell's Method: Description, Examples, Mathematica code

Evolutionary Algorithms: Basic Description, Many Links to Explore

Linear Programming: Very Basic Introduction with Examples

Linear Programming: Proper Introduction

Method of Steepest/Gradient Descent

Numerically Solving Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs)

Chapter 16 of Numerical Recipes

Euler's Method, with Examples

Derivation of RK2 (Runge Kutta, Second Order)



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