I am emailing a link of this to everyone on the class list every week. If you are not receiving these emails or want to have them sent to another email address feel free to email me at jpmccarthymaths@gmail.com and I will add you to the mailing list.

Assignment 1

Assignment 1 has a hand-in time and date of 11:00 Thursday 27 February (Week 5).

See the Week 2 Summary for more.

One final warning: do not give your work to others to copy. If there is a lack of originality of presentation I will be dividing marks between those who copy each other and the person who did the original work will be penalised along with those who copy them.

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.

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 Problem F, Assignment 1, on P.66 of the manual. The intention with Problem F 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 Q. 2 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 Q. 3 if you do six iterations and do not yet have convergence.

Week 4

I was late on Monday… so we had a tutorial instead of a lecture.

We had another tutorial Wednesday AM.

We worked on Chapter 2 Wednesday PM and Thursday.

09:00 Wednesday 26 February

We will not have class 09:00 on Wednesday. Instead we will have class at 09:00 on Thursday, provisionally in B185. Watch this space.

Week 5

We will hopefully finish off our work on the method of undetermined coefficients between Monday and Wednesday PM. We will have two hours of tutorial on Thursday morning before the Assignment 1 deadline of 11:00.

Study

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

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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