CSC2302H -- Numerical Solution of Initial Value Problems for Ordinary Differential Equations

Current announcements

• Assignment Number three is now posted. It is due on December 7.
• Information on the course project is now posted. You should be thinking about a suitable topic over the next few weeks and have the topic approved by mid November. Feel free to send email or drop by to dicuss your choice.
• There will be no lecture on Tuesday, October 26 as I will be at a conference. This lecture will be made up by adding an extra lecture at the end of term -- date is TBA.
• Assignment Number two is now posted. It will require some programming as well as some analysis.
• The first lecture will be held on Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 9:00 - 11:00 in WB 130.
• Effective next week (October 5) the lectures for this course will be Tuesdays 9-11 in Ba 025. That is the time remains the same-- only the location changes.
• Assignment Number one is now posted. It will require some programming and a sample driver is provided as is the Fortran source code for the continuous Runge Kutta method you will be investigating. The source code for the method, DVERK, as well as the documentation for the code can be downloaded from this webpage.
• As I noted in lectures, Professor Jackson prepared a short note several years ago which gives a nice overview of Fortran. It is still relevant today and may be helpful to those of you working with Fortran for the first time. This short overview is availble as Fortran overview.

General Information

• The general information handout for the course is available here .
• Tentative lecture schedule (text file) as of September 2010 (before classes start).
• The expected background and prerequisites for the course.
• Lecture notes will be made available and updated as much as possible as the course progresses. Please report any errors or typos.

Textbooks

• The textbook for the course is: Computer methods for Ordinary Differential Equations
  and Differential-Algebraic Equations,
  by U. M. Ascher and L. R. Petzold; SIAM, 1998.
• Check the list of other related references (html file).
• Matlab will be used in some of the assignments. A useful reference to obtain a quick working knowledge of MATLAB is the online documentation/examples as well as a brief MATLAB Introduction, and a MATLAB Tutorial . It is probably best to start by reading and doing examples from the Tutorial and the Introduction.

Policies

• on plagiarism (html file)
• on lateness (html file)

Lectures per month

Assignments and Project

• Assignment No. 1 using source code with corresponding documentation.
  A sample Fortran driver which uses DVERK to solve a preditor-prey problem and generate a Matlab script to plot the solution is given here.
• Assignment No. 2.
• The Project: You should be deciding in the next few weeks on the topic for your course project. Possible projects and guidelines can be found from the above link. Any required source code and documentation can be obtained from the links associated with the assignments, or by emailing me.
• Assignment No. 3 using either the method RADAU or ode15s from MatLab.

Contact Information: