Course Overview

Welcome to ‘Scientific Computing in MATLAB’. We are delighted you have chosen this course and hope it will meet your expectations.

In this preliminary unit we shall be looking at:

  • communications
  • managing your learning
  • activities.

If you are already familiar with online study, you will be able to skip through these sessions quickly and get onto the real stuff. If you are not, it may answer a few of your questions. If you have any remaining questions contact your tutor who will be happy to help.

If you have questions relating to the academic content or learning, please contact your course tutor, who will introduce him-or herself to you via email.

Mathematical prerequisites

The course is a mathematically based one and we assume that you have studied mathematics to A level or equivalent. You should be familiar with the ideas of vectors, matrices, differentiation and integration along with basic probability and statistics. There will be reminders of the key mathematical ideas where they are used, along with appropriate references, but we will not be explaining everything from scratch.

Required reading

There is no required reading for this course, which is relatively self-contained. References are given throughout the course where you can find more information on particular topics, many of which are online resources or help files. There are however certain places where no appropriate online sources are available, so we have given references to appropriate books.

Required software

For this course you will need access to a computer with the MATLAB software installed. Section 0.3 contains details on how to get MATLAB. If you already have access to MATLAB then you can skip this section.

Units

This course is divided into six units, each of which is designed to take between a few hours and a few days to cover, depending on your prior programming and mathematics experience. The units are as follows:

  1. Unit 1: Basic introduction to MATLAB
  2. Unit 2: Data analysis, image analysis and basic statistics in MATLAB
  3. Unit 3: Basic calculus in MATLAB
  4. Unit 4: Linear algebra in MATLAB
  5. Unit 5: Solving ODEs in MATLAB
  6. Unit 6: Software engineering and scientific computing

Each unit consists of:

  • an introduction giving you an outline of the topic covered in the unit and its learning objectives
  • information about the topic you are studying, giving you the context within which your reading should make sense
  • a number of activities, some of which are pen and paper exercises, and the majority of which are MATLAB exercises (and both types contain hints and solutions)
  • recommended resources for further exploration.

Learning expectations

Depending on how the course you are taking is structured, you may be working full-time on this course, or only for a few hours a week. You will find that a lot of that time is spent working on the exercises in MATLAB and – we hope – discussing the issues with your fellow students. This will help you to share ideas and experiences and learn from others as you progress through the course.

In undertaking this course, you are committing yourself to:

  • regularly reading the course materials
  • working through all activities, which is especially important as this is the main mechanism for learning on this course
  • completing the final assignment.