Assignment 1

Assignment 1 has a hand-in time and date of 12:00 Friday 1 March (Week 5). Submit in class or to A283.

Read the P.51 and P.52 instructions carefully. You will be submitting an Excel file, and written work, including a print out of your Excel work.

Note in particular:

  • Work submitted after the deadline will be assigned a mark of ZERO. Hand up whatever you have on time.
  • Only Partial Pivoting has to be done using Excel.
  • Note that if you are doing Gaussian Elimination by hand you must use exact fractions and square roots rather a decimal approximation.
  • I advise that you do the questions out roughly first because small mistakes are inevitable.

The files you need to complete this assignment have been emailed to you. If you don’t want to calculate your c_i and P they are calculated in MATH7021A1 – Student Data.

We have now covered enough in class for you to do all of the Assignment. I recommend that you start ASAP.

WARNING!

This gives a good opportunity for collaboration but remember collaboration does not mean one student solving the problem and everyone else copying that student’s work. I demand originality of presentation here and you should at least understand what you hand up. If you are unsure of what I mean by this please email me immediately as if I have students who have clearly copied the answer word-for-word from another student they will all be sharing the marks.

Start early so you have enough time to complete the assignment properly and get good learning from it.

THIS IS A LEARNING ACTIVITY NOT JUST A GRADED ACTIVITY. THE CHAPTER ONE EXAM QUESTION IS WORTH 24.5% OF YOUR FINAL GRADE WHILE THIS ASSIGNMENT IS WORTH JUST 15%. THINK ABOUT WHAT THIS MEANS.

Regarding Q. 1.3.5, Assignment 1, on P.62 of the manual. The intention with Q. 1.3.5 (b) really is for you to engage in some problem solving skills to come up with a clever way of implementing the Jacobi Method in Excel.
It should still be doable by hand but if it takes a large number of iterations to converge (to two significant figures), Excel is far more suitable.
It is possible that it could take a small number of iterations to converge to two significant figures (say two or three iterations) — which is no problem by hand — but potentially it could take more (at least six). I don’t really want people spending loads of time doing iterations by hand, so I will give 3/4 marks for part (b) if you do six iterations by hand. If you want to keep going – by hand – until convergence (to two significant figures) you can of course get the 4/4 marks – but you need to ask yourself is it worth your time to keep going for the sake of one mark (out of 60… out of 15% —- that is 0.25% of your final grade).
If it converges with fewer than six iterations then happy days for you, you can get 4/4.
If it doesn’t, you might be better off trying to come up with a way of doing the question in Excel if you really want all the marks.
You can still answer part (c) if you do six iterations and do not yet have convergence.

Week 4

We started our work on Chapter 2 — the method of undetermined coefficients for solving linear odes. We only just started talking about the case of external forces. We had a tutorial on Thursday.

Week 5

We will hopefully finish off our work on the method of undetermined coefficients: and the rest of the week can be given over to tutorial time.

Study

Please feel free to ask me questions about the exercises via email or even better on this webpage.

Exam Papers

These are not always found in your programme selection — most of the time you will have to look here.

Student Resources

Please see the Student Resources tab on the top of this page for information on the Academic Learning Centre, etc..

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