Homework and project

There will be 4 homework assignments during the quarter, requiring a combination of analytical and programming work. See Homework format below for information on the desired format.

There will also be an open-book midterm exam, and a course project (see below).

Peer review of other students homework and other group projects will also be a required component of the course (see below).

Schedule (tentative)

• Homework 1: due Thursday, Jan. 15
• Homework 2: due Thursday, Jan. 29
• Homework 3: due Thursday, Feb. 12
• Homework 4: due Thursday, Feb. 26
• Midterm: Friday, Feb. 27
• Project presentations: Wednesday and Friday, March 11, 13
• Project paper due: Friday, March 13

Midterm

There will be a midterm exam, tentatively scheduled for February 27. The exam will be open book, open notes. The goal will be to insure that you are proficient with some of the theory and algorithms presented in the course. See Midterm for some topics to review.

Course Project

Students will also work on a project (individually or in groups of 2) and will write a report on the project and give a brief talk in a symposium tentatively scheduled for Saturday, March 14.

See Course Projects for more about the class project and some suggested topics.

Homework format

Homework should be submitted by committing to your GitHub repository. Details to appear. The final version should be pushed by 11:00pm on the date due.

Written solutions should be submitted as pdf files (not Word, please). Ideally these should be typeset using latex. (See Latex for some sources). If necessary you can hand write and scan, but typeset work is much easier to grade and is good practice.

You can write analytical solutiosn in an IPython notebook if you wish to, which makes it particularly easy to mix analysis with code illustrations. If you do so, submit both the .ipynb file and also the pdf generated by nbconvert.

For computer code, please include suitable documentation to describe what you’ve done and also explain it in your written solutions when appropriate.

Peer Review

Following each homework, students will be asked to peer review another student’s submission. You will not assign grades, but will be asked to make constructive comments. The comments will be turned in for credit, and anonymized versions will be distributed along with the instructor’s comments and grades.