Introduction

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Welcome

Math 230, Programming and Mathematical Problem Solving

I’m Doug Baldwin

Overloads

• Approved ones see me to sign form
• Others watch for drop/adds

Key points from syllabus

• Heavily programming course
  • Including commenting
• Old materials online
• Subscription “textbook” - instructions in syllabus
• Need to install Matlab
• 2 hour exams
• Grading based on expectations for what students should be able to do on a question and a coarse classification, using the full 100-percentage-point grading scale, of answers that don’t meet expectations
• “Participation” = a combination of attending class, speaking in class discussions, engaging in lab and other in-class activities, and being prepared with reading summaries or questions.
  • What I expect here is that students will be present for most classes, will contribute regularly to discussions (but “regularly” doesn’t necessarily mean to every single one), and will have something relevant to say when randomly picked for a reading summary.

Materials for this course are online via Canvas

Introduction to Matlab

Matlab as an interactive command interpreter

• Type simple arithmetic expressions to have them evaluated
• diary logs session into a file
  • diary off stops logging
• help prints information about operations or commands
• format controls how output appears
  • e.g., format compact to single-space output
  • e.g., format long to print numbers to 15 digits
• clc clears transcript in command window (but not in diary files)
• Up-arrow key to recall previous commands
• quit to shut Matlab down

Here is the diary file for the demonstration I did in class.

Note that the last example, 3.14 + 8 = 11.140000000000001 demonstrates “round-off error,” the fact that computers can’t represent all numbers exactly, and so sometimes deviate slightly from “true” values.

• In many situations this doesn’t matter, but in some it matters very much.

Next

How the computer works to execute Matlab (or any other program)

Read sections 1.1 through 1.3

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