The course has two goals. First, to teach you how to program in Fortran 95 (which is a slight modification to Fortran 90). Second, to introduce you to the most basic issues in, broadly understood, scientific computing. In this way the course can also serve as a preparation to the further explorations in computational methods of solving mathematical problems found in courses dealing with Numerical Methods.
This course is the first attempt at running it completely using the WebCT environment, so I expect we will run into a number of glitches and your understanding and help are highly appreciated. As a matter of fact, I hope that you will give me ideas as to how this course can be improved so that future students can be more satisfied and learn more while taking this course.
Modern computing is a discipline that is very much a team effort and requires very good communication skills. This being the case, since WebCT provides appropriate support mechanisms (bulletin board and e-mail) I will try to find ways to encourage your working on communication abilities.
Furthermore, since written communication is one of the more important aspects of being a "professional" in any of the sciences, you will find that a number of homework assignments involve writing. More precisely, you will be asked to write reports that summarize the results of your investigations. Envision these to be similar to the reports you had to write in any of the laboratory sciences in high school or in college.
Marcin Paprzycki (dr. P.)
In case you do not know this yet, I am spending this academic year in Poland as an American Senior Specialist Fulbright Scholar. This means that this course is going to be a truly distance-learning experience. This in turn has some important consequences:
Address in US:
Department of Computer Science
Oklahoma State University
Tulsa, OK 74106
Address in Poland:
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University
Umultowska 87
Poznan, Poland
Private MAIL (inside of WebCT) use the Mail (Private) link on the "control panel"
E-mail (you can use either one, but in case of emergency use both as either of the servers may be down):
marcin.paprzycki@ibspan.waw.pl
Web-site: