INTRODUCTION TO SCIENTIFICCOMPUTING {DRAFTJuly, 2001There are 2 parts to these

notes, each addressing the topics of a year-longcourse in scienti c computing. The courses are
math475A and math475B atU. Arizona. Since the students taking this course sequence come
from diversebackgrounds and most of them do not know any analysis, we have focusedon scienti
c computing, rather than numerical analysis.These notes were never developed for public
consumption, and just like othersets of elementary scienti c computing notes and textbooks,
originality is notone of its strong characteristics. There are a few books which have stronglyin
uenced what is presented here: the book by Atkinson on numerical anal-ysis (I expressly use
an old edition), Isaacson and Keller's book which isavailable from Dover, my own student
notes (I took numerical analysis fromRidgway Scott, Jinchao Xu, Douglas Arnold, and Todd
Dupont, and at-tended classes by Stanley Osher while at UCLA).An alternative set of notes that
is worth looking at are those prepared byCleve Moler, and are available freely from his
Mathworks site.The portion of these notes related to linear algebra is cursory. The reasonis
simple: there are people who can do a much better job at presentingthis material and
there are good books out there that cover that material.With regard to fundamentals I would
strongly suggest Strang's linear algebrabook, as well as Trefethen and Bau's book. Their
geometric approach hasrevolutionized how applied linear algebra is taught. The geometric
approachdevelops the type of insight fundamental to scienti c computing.These notes are being
extensively revised. The major revisions are: (1) Incor-poration of many more examples. (2)
Restructuring of the course material.(3) Making greater use of hyperlinks in order to reduce the
complexity of thenotes, while at the same time making the cross references a useful feature ofthe
text. (4) Changing the notes to PDF format.As I said, these notes were never intended to be
public. This is aworkin progress, and as such, it is bound to have many errors, primarily of
typo-graphic nature (a regretful decision was to have these notes typed by someone1