However 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 anyuse to you. Moreover, I
am particularly interested in receiving correctionsand suggestions.At some point in time the use
of matlab in numerical analysis classes wasquite rare. I remember using a version of matlab
back in 1987. It was stillunder development by Cleve Moler (and available only at Stanford). I
startedgetting into the habit of writing code in matlab, debugging it, and only whenit was
debugged, porting the code to c/fortran/C++ (usually leaving all ofthe heavy lifting to fortran,
the dynamic memory allocation to c, and thetext/object oriented programming aspects to C+
+). It cut down the timeI 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 toyand
should not be used to teach, let alone compute; their silly claim was thatreal computing was
done in c, C++, fortran, etc. My orthodox colleagueswere able to have their better students
write 4-5 high level codes during atypical 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 ghtis
over!). If you do not know matlab, you have little to worry, unless youare afraid to
experiment. Matlab is an interpretive computer language andsometimes the best way to nd
out how something works is just to try it out1.Read the rst 20 pages of the primer and do
homework 1 of Math475A. Thisshould take no more than 1:20 hours to do. This will teach you
enough ofthe 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 matlabthat will be useful.The
sequence followed in these notes results from two things: The assumptionthat matlab might be
new to the student. Since we go from scalar, to vector,1You can consider OCTAVE, which is
free. But if you are going to do this, you might aswell consider PYTHON, which subsumes an
interpretive scienti c computing environmentinto a shell/macro environment. It is free and the
web is replete with tutorials and lots oftools to use.2