else who in turn faced the challenge of interpreting my own handwritten

scrib-
bles). I would be delighted to hear from you, if these notes have been of
any
use to you. Moreover, I am particularly interested in receiving corrections
and suggestions.
At some point in time the use of matlab in numerical analysis classes was
quite rare. I remember using a version of matlab back in 1987. It was still
under development by Cleve Moler (and available only at Stanford). I
started
getting into the habit of writing code in matlab, debugging it, and only when
it was debugged, porting the code to c/fortran/C++ (usually leaving all of
the heavy lifting to fortran, the dynamic memory allocation to c, and the
text/object oriented programming aspects to C++). It cut down the time
I spent coding by a factor of 8-10, as compared to working directly with a
"high level programming language."
I started using matlab for teaching in 1994 (while at UCLA) as did others.
It was amusing to see some of my colleagues insist that matlab was just a
toy
and should not be used to teach, let alone compute; their silly claim was
that
real computing was done in c, C++, fortran, etc. My orthodox colleagues
were able to have their better students write 4-5 high level codes during a
typical semester; I was able to have most of my students write between 20-
35,
using matlab, focusing on scienti c computing rather than programming.
Anyway, the use of matlab is no longer an issue (and I am glad that silly
ght
is over!). If you do not know matlab, you have little to worry, unless you
are afraid to experiment. Matlab is an interpretive computer language and
sometimes the best way to nd out how something works is just to try it out
1
.
Read the rst 20 pages of the primer and do homework 1 of Math475A.
This
should take no more than 1:20 hours to do. This will teach you enough of
the essentials of matlab to get going. The homeworks, beyond the rst one,
in math475A and B all start with a little primer on some aspect of matlab
that will be useful.