Another distraction but one that is going to be fun (I hope)
The Cambridge Mathematics department every year publish a list of structured computing projects coverting all sorts of mathematical projects. I thought it would be quite fun and instructive to get a group of my fellow OU students together to try and do some of them ourselves compare notes and code etc.
The department page is here
http://www.maths.cam.ac.uk/undergrad/catam/
The list of projects for the second year students is here
http://www.maths.cam.ac.uk/undergrad/catam/IB/index.html
The students are recommend to do 4 and the introductory project
Then the Bewildering list of projects for the third year is given here
http://www.maths.cam.ac.uk/undergrad/catam/II/
Of course no one does them all, I think it's about 3 or 4
The projects are not purely programming exercises or exercises in software engineering but seem to give a
real insight into the technique being used. I would estimate with all the other stuff TMA's exam revision etc
it would take 2 -3 months to complete and write a single project up. If any fellow OU student would like to join me in this venture I have set up a shared activities forum and if you send me your OU id (ie the short 5-6 letter code that the OU give you to let you into the system eg mine is cdaf2 Not your personal identifier)
I can let you in.
It's started. :-)
ReplyDeleteJust spent a couple of hours following Cambridge's intro notes, and trying to cross-correlate them into Scilab, since the syntax is not identical to Matlab. Eg %pi instead of pi seems to be needed as one minor example.
I think we'll need a sub-thread in your project forum for the syntax translations for anyone using Scilab, etc.
Have now got Scilab up-and-running and plotting pretty much whatever I want.
Hopefully many students will join your forum, Chris.
Great idea for a collaborative, social venture.
ReplyDeleteI only wish I had the background to join in. Maybe next Hilary term, we could set one up for pure maths, from the Camb notes?
Great Stuff Keith Maybe I should switch to Sci Lab. So far you are the only taker but it's early days yet. Obviously we all have different rates of working. I would hope to complete the introductory exercise on root finding by end October and the two core projects in 1 B by end of Christmas which would seem to tally with the Cambridge Timetable. Then 2 of the 4 options probably the physics based ones. Continued Fractions and Statisitical Hypothesis testing doesn't really appeal. After that then 2 or 3 months per project from the third year list.
ReplyDeleteDaniel you shouldn't need that much background to do the core projects. Ok for the ODE's you might need to download the units from MST209 covering ODE's. Do as Keith has done and download SciLab and use the Cambridge guide to help you
Hope more people join in