Mathematics for Scientists

MA1S11 (Linear Algebra and Discrete Mathematics)

Course Details

Instructor: Tristan McLoughlin.
Times: Monday at 4pm in Goldsmith Hall, Wednesday at noon and Friday at 9am in MacNeill lecture theatre in the Hamilton Building.
Tutorials: Group lists for tutorials will be available in at the beginning of the week on the noticeboard next to the School of Maths entrance on the ground floor of the Hamilton building.
Clickers: We will have clicker questions in class. Clickers for students taking BY1101 will receive them in their Biology booklets. Other students can get them between 12.00 and 14:00 on Friday 26th Sep, outside the Science course office in the Hamilton lobby. There is a refundable 10 euro deposit (bring exact change).
Textbooks:

Elementary Linear Algebra (10th Edition) by Anton and Rorres (some copies avaibable in Library).
Linear Algebra by Jim Hefferon (available for free here.)

Grading:

Tutorials count for 20% of grade.
Final exam counts for 80% of grade.

Course Outline

Linear algebra: The syllabus for this part will be approximately chapters 1, 3 and parts of 10 of Anton and Rorres.
- Vectors, geometric interpretation, norm, vector addition, dot product.
- Systems of linear equations and Gauss-Jordan elimination.
- Matrices, inverses, diagonal, triangular, symmetric, trace.
- Selected application in different branches of science.
Computer algebra: An introduction to the application of computers to mathematical calculation. We will make use of the computational software SAGE which is available online. We will also consider Wolfram Mathematica which is available for download from ISS.
Spreadsheets: A brief overview of what spreadsheets do. Assignments based on Google docs.
Numbers: An introduction to numbers and number systems e.g. binary, octal and hexadecimal numbers and algorithms for converting between them.