CS 107 - Introduction to Scientific Computation Syllabus

This syllabus is not a contract. We reserve the right to spend more time than scheduled on certain topics, less time on others and may, as a result, omit others. In short, the syllabus is a guide that represents our best thinking about the course at the time it was constructed.

Overview of CS-107: Computing environment, online/offline resources

Computation: Computations, Algorithms, and Software

MATLAB Read-Eval-Print Loop (REPL): expressions, commands, variables, assignment, prefix/infix/postfix notation, parsing

Fundamental Types: Boolean representation, integers, floating point numbers, text, characters, Booleans, logical operators

Collections and Indexing: Vectors, indices, matrices, mixed data

Files: File hierarchy, importing/exporting data, scripts

Functions: Functions, functions as arguments/return values, wrapper functions

Conditionals: If-elseif-else, switch/case

Loops: for, while, nested loops, accumulators, loop termination

Scope: persistent variables, global variables, function scope, pass by references

Scientific/Mathematical thinking and Computational/Algorithmic thinking

Introduction to Java with MATLAB parallels