³ÉÈË´óƬ

Resources for the course Numerical Methods II - for more information about the course, please see course outlines.

MLC Drop-In Centre

Students from Numerical Methods II can use the drop-in centre, but we will give priority to first year students. If you see every other table has students, then we would appreciate it if you found another place to sit so that there is room for new students.

Please note that not every staff member in the MLC knows all of the content in Numerical Methods II, there will be times when we can only give general study advice for this course. Note also that we are not able to give help with fixing MATLAB code.

Resources for numerical methods

This section of the course is about calculating mathematical things that you have previously done with formal algebraic methods. You need to be familiar enough with these problems to make sense of the numerical solutions. There are also some skills that you will need from previous study. (Note there are no revision seminars for Numerical Methods II students on this content, yet.) 

Polynomials

Polynomials are used in Numerical Methods for approximating functions. It's good to have an understanding of how they behave. This lecture on Polynomials from the old MathsTrack bridging course will help you revise the behaviour of polynomials.

Taylor's theorem

Taylor's theorem is used in Numerical Methods to figure out errors in methods of approximation. 

This seminar for Maths IB students in Summer Semester 2019 gave an intro into what Taylor series and Taylor polynomials are, then gave several examples of finding them and working with the error formula.

This revision seminar for Maths IB students from 2016 was specifically about the Taylor error formula. 

Integration

Numerical Methods covers ways to approximate integrals for functions you don't know. This is based on the idea of an average value using integration. This lecture from the old MathTrackX bridging course introduces integration specifically from the perspective of average values, and may help you to revise your understanding of integration.

Some methods for approximating integrals are the trapezoidal rule and Simpson's rule, which used to be part of the Maths IA curriculum. This revision seminar was given for Maths IA students in 2017, and it contained a section on the trapezoidal rule and Simpson's rule and their errors (starting at 1h41m). 

Matrices and row operations

Solving linear equations is something that is discussed in Numerical Methods, and row operations are an explanation for why some of the methods work. This revision seminar was given for students in Maths IA in 2014 and covers matrix operations and also using matrices to solve linear equations (the linear equations section begins at about 58 mins).

Orthogonal matrices are one of the tools that are used to help solve equations in Numerical Methods. This revision seminar was given for students in Maths IB in 2020 and begins with a section on orthogonal matrices.

Newton's method

One technique in Numerical Methods is Newton's Method (also known as the Newton-Raphson method). This revision seminar for Maths IB from 2016 covered the use of Newton's method (and the bisection method) to find solutions of equations.