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 for solving mathematical problems found in courses like Numerical Methods.
This course has been running already for a few semesters within the WebCT environment. However, it is not perfect and I expect that we will run into a number of glitches and your understanding and help are highly appreciated. In particular, I am trying to have this happening as close to the textbook as spossible. I have decided that for a web-based course this may be the best way to proceed. This means, howevert, that I am assigning most homework assignments directly from the book. In some cases these book-based assignments have been found somewhat confusing. If you experience this, please remind me to improve the assignment descriptions (augment it in the web-environment). 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 it.
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. This point is very important! I have found that in the past these classess that utilized the bulletin board to communicate did better than these that tried to do everything individually. With my travel schedule it may be that I am not able to reply to your personal e-mails on time, but when all of you e-communicate, you should be able to find solution to common problems and to straighten misunderstandings.
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. Please take these assignments seriously and do not try to blow them off with a few words and a table. This is not what is expected and I am really serious about it.
Marcin Paprzycki (dr. P.)
In case you do not know this yet, for family reasons, I am spending this semester in Poland. This means that this course is going to be a truly distance-learning experience. This in turn has some important consequences:
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: