INSTRUCTOR:
Prof. Andrew Knyazev
Office: CU (Dravo Bldg) 644. Phone: (303) 556-8102.
Office hours: Tuesday 4-6 pm, or by appointment.
WWW: http://math.ucdenver.edu/~aknyazev
TEXTBOOK:
Linear Algebra and Its Applications, 3/E
by David Lay.
Published by
Addison-Wesley Higher Education, 2003
ISBN: 0-201-70970-8 or
ISBN: 0-321-13180-0.
The computer project makes 20% of the total score.
The goal of the project is for students to learn the basics of MATLAB. The students are invited and expected to use the MERC lab. Those, who prefere to run MATLAB at home, may be interested in purchasing a MATLAB Student Version Release 13 that became avialabe in December 2002.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
The project has two parts.
The first part is to run the MATLAB code, written by the teacher and provided here. The run will generate a picture, which will look similar to this sample. Students need to print their own copy of the picture from MATLAB after they run the code and include it in the project report in a separate page.
The code has been tested under MATLAB Release 13 and is not guaranteed to work with earlier versions of MATLAB. The code does not work under Octave.
The second part of the project is less trivial. Students will need to carefully study the text of the code provided and understand what it actually does. The second page of the project report should contain an explanation of what the picture means and demonstrates.
Here is sample report by an anonymous author,
written in the form of a
limerick, mostly known after
Edward Lear:
There was a line drawn on sand,
Who knows what the dear teacher has meant?
But after some thinking,
And lots of water drinking,
I finally can understand.
The vertical axis presents
A course of one's life, in percents,
While the X-axis shows
Linear Algebra one knows.
What's an interesting turn of events!
We can now derive a conclusion,
That one's life is a mere illusion.
LU factors are jewels,
Linear Algebra rules;
Let it not be a source of confusion.
Such report would not get any points for the substance as it does not have much to do with the real meaning of the picture, but could get some partial credit for the presentation style and originality.
The project must not have more than two pages: one with the picture (please make sure that the time stamp on your picture is different from that on the sample provided here) and another page with the explanations. The project report should be turned in as a hard copy during the regular class time on April 24. No late reports will be accepted!
This project is an individual work. It's OK to get all sorts of help with each individual MATLAB function used in the code. In particular, I'll be glad to answer to any questions like this in class. It's not OK to get any kind of help with two or more lines of the code. A clear similarity of project reports by different students will be treated as cheating with evident consequences.