Exam 1 information
- In-class, See course calendar for date.
- Allowed:
- Two pages (single sided letter size) of your own handwritten notes.
(e.g. formulas, method descriptions...) You should write this as a summary
for your self while going through the material (Hence it has to be your own,
not copied from someone else).
- Calculator: Regular numeric, non-programmable calculator, see
the university calculator policy.
Topics and format
The exam will have questions of the same format and type as in the
Heath exercises, ie questions testing your knowledge of theory describing
the numerical methods and their limitations as well as (small)
numerical calculations testing your hands-on skills.
Sample exam,
To be ready for the exam practice on the recommended exercises (lectures
page) . You need to practice for yourself to
to well in numerical analysis (and math in general). It is not sufficient
to just read the book.
The topics covered will be defined by the
lecture material as follows, and approximately equally weighted:
- Intro and error analysis: Basic error analysis and propagation.
Know how to apply this for the problems in the subsequent chapters.
- Linear equation systems.
- Overdetermined linear system.
- Interpolation
- Eigenvalues, vectors, Only the topics of Ch4 covered in the lectures.
Exam 2 information
- Allowed:
- Four pages (single sided letter size) of your own handwritten notes.
(e.g. formulas, method descriptions...) You should write this as a summary
for your self while going through the material (Hence it has to be your own,
not copied from someone else). Presumably the first two can be the ones you wrote for exam 1, and while reviewing the material for exam 2 you write an additional two.
- Calculator: Defined as for exam 1.
Topics and format
To be ready for the exam practice on the recommended exercises (lectures
page) and try the on-line demos. You need to practice for yourself to
to well in numerical analysis (and math in general). It is not sufficient
to just read the book.
Sample exam
Coverage in addition to exam 1:
- Eigenvalues, vectors.
- Non-linear equations
- Optimization
The final will test what was taught in the course - lectures, seminars, labs and assignments. The guide on the lectures page to chapters and exercises in the Heath textbook covers this material. However, I frequently derived methods in slightly different ways - e.g. last weeks simpler direct derivation of Gauss Newton for non-linear least squares, instead of like in Heath going via scalar optimisation. Similarly the lectures covered different examples, and focused more on the mathematical modelling.
We learn best by doing - work through exercises in Heath and anything in the labs and assignments that was unclear. If it's hard to start work through the solved examples from the lectures and in the Heath book. Avoid consulting answer keys first or relying on AI. You can do this when you're really stuck, but afterwards work it though yourself also.