Announcements
- 9/22/2022: Welcome to Math 170A, Lecture A00, Fall 2022!
Instructional Staff
Name |
Role |
E-mail |
Office hours
|
Shuang Liu |
Instructor |
shl083@ucsd.edu |
MW: 9-10:30am AP&M 1121
|
Yiming Zhang
A01 and A02
|
Teaching Assistant |
yiz134@ucsd.edu |
Thursdays 3-5pm, HSS 4047
|
Daotong Ge
A03 and A04
|
Teaching Assistant |
dge@ucsd.edu
|
Tuesdays 12-2pm, HSS 5056
|
Course Information
- Textbook: The required textbook for this course
is Fundamentals of Matrix Computation,
by David Watkins; 3rd edition. 2nd edition is acceptable.
Note: You are greatly encouraged to read the textbook
alongside the lectures and other materials we provide.
- Coursework: There will be weekly homework
assignments due on Thursdays (starting with Week 1, see
calendar); they will be posted
on the Canvas website for the class. There will be three
quizzes, one midterm, and a final exam; dates, times, and
locations posted on syllabus.
- Piazza is an online discussion forum; we will use
Piazza. It will allow you to post messages (openly or
anonymously) and answer posts made by your fellow students,
about course content, homework, exams, etc. You are
encouraged to sign up here.
This website is shared between Math 170A Lecture A00 and
Lecture B00 students.
Note: Piazza has an opt-in "Piazza Careers" section
which, if you give permission, will share statistics about
your Piazza use with potential future employers. It also has
a "social network" component, based on other students who've
shared a Piazza-based class with you, that comes with the
usual warnings about privacy concerns. Piazza is fully FERPA
compliant, and is an allowed resource at UCSD. Nevertheless,
you are not required to use Piazza if you do not wish.
Lecture Notes
Lecture notes will be made available on Canvas under Modules. You
may use them as supplements, in addition to the lectures and
podcast.
About Gradescope
Gradescope is an online tool for uploading and
grading assignments an exams (it is now under the umbrella
of TurnItIn). You will turn in your homework and exams
through Gradescope, and you will access your graded exams
there as well.
You can access Gradescope through Canvas.
- You can access Gradescope directly through your Canvas
Math 170A page, by click on the "Gradescope" link in the
tab on the left.
- If you have not yet been added to the course, the
Gradescope entry code is use your UCSD email!
- Please make sure your files are legible before
submitting, and also to assign the pages you want graded
for each problem.
- Most word processors can save files as a pdf.
- There are many tools to combine pdfs, such as here, and others
for turning jpgs into pdfs, such as here.
About Matlab
MATLAB (from "
matrix
laboratory") is a
programming language and numerical computing environment
widely used in applied mathematics, engineering, computer
science and sciences in general. Many assignments (and even
some test questions) will be to write short programs for
Matlab. One thing to know about Matlab: the command
‘help’ is your best friend! Use to look up what functions do
and the syntax.
We will do basic MATLAB programming in this course. While we
will talk about the MATLAB specific programming details during
class, I will expect that you know some programming basics,
including what a "for loop" is. (The for loop is about the
most complicated programming concept we'll use, and
fortunately it's not too complicated.)
There are three main ways to get access to Matlab:
- UCSD students can download it for free from this link.
- For a review of basic programming in MATLAB, a good
resource for intro MATLAB can be found on Professor Bruce
Driver's website, here.
- You can use a UCSD virtual computer lab (from home or
anywhere). You log in with your UCSD credentials. Info here;
search for "virtual computing labs".
- You can buy a student copy of the software at the
bookstore for $99.
- You can also access MATLAB in one of our physical
computing labs.
(Acknowledgement: Special thanks to Professor Ioana Dumitriu and Professor Caroline Moosmüller for sharing recourses and course policies.)