Welcome

Welcome to Computational Methods for Scientists, Comp-526

Logistics

• Office hours: announced on the course Canvas page or by appointment.

Note

Who am I?

• Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics and the Computational Science Research Center

• Previously:

  • Research Software Engineer for 3+ years at Caltech, in the CliMA group

  • Postdoctoral Research Associate at CU Boulder, in Jed Brown’s PhyPID group

  • PhD in Applied Math from NJIT

  • some industry experience with CAD/CAM system development and at Pixar in the Research group

Resources

• SIAM Membership is free for students (30% discount on SIAM books)

• Books

  • Driscoll and Braun, Fundamentals of Numerical Computation

    • free, in Julia with demo notebooks and Julia codes

  • Greenbaum and Chartier (2012), Numerical Methods Design, Analysis, and Computer Implementation of Algorithms

    • an excellent, comprehensive book

    • not free, uses Matlab for limited numerical examples

  • Sauer (2012), Numerical Analysis

    • used for this course in other semesters.

  • Boyd and Vandenberghe (2018), Introduction to Applied Linear Algebra

    • practical introduction to linear algebra for computer scientists; free PDF

  • 3Blue1Brown, Linear Algebra

    • collection of beautiful videos visualizing linear algebra

  • Trefethen and Bau (1997), Numerical Linear Algebra (PDF via library)

    • fantastic, but limited to numerical linear algebra and covers more advanced topics; free PDF via library

  • Myers, Van de Geijn, and Van de Geijn (2020), Linear Algebra: Foundations to Frontiers

    • linear algebra with attention to performance; free PDF and videos

  • Eijkhout (2023), The Art of HPC

    • collection of free books on numerical and scientific computing, plus “carpentry”

PSA

Together with some colleagues in the Computational Science Research Center at SDSU we are working on the transition of an open-source software library into an open-source ecosystem.

If you are currently enrolled as a Master student at SDSU and are looking for a job opportunity, we are hiring.