Notes on the Coursera Edition

This Coursera course is based on a course offered by the Applied Mathematics Department at the University of Washington. These notes are a modified version of the notes used in the class. Please see About these notes – important disclaimers for more about the class notes.

Most of the lectures you will view were recorded during a live presentation of the course. Some discussions have been edited out, along with specific discussion of interest only to UW students taking the course for credit.

Please note the following about the Coursera Edition:

• There is no direct faculty support for this course. Please do not email the instructor – there are too many students to allow any personalized response.
• A teaching assistant will moderate the discussion forum, but for the most part students must rely on other students to help out with difficulties that may arise.
• The software used in this course is all open source (freely available). It is the responsibility of the student to find adequate computational resources to do the suggested homework problems or otherwise explore the material. See Downloading and installing software for this class for some tips on installing software and pointers to some other computing options. The discussion forum may also be a useful resource.
• One option to avoid installing several packages is to use the Virtual Machine for this class. An introduction to the VM is given in one of the Week 1 lectures.
• Another option is to compute “in the cloud”, see Amazon Web Services EC2 AMI. An introduction will be given in one of the Week 2 lectures.
• Each set of lectures will have a quiz associated with it. These will be automatically graded to give you feedback on whether you are understanding the material. However, there is no credit or certificate given for this course and the grading is only for your own information.
• The suggested homework assignments will not be submitted or graded, they are simply an opportunity to get some hands-on practice with the material. Sample solutions will be posted at some point after the suggested completion date.