MAS 864: The Nature of Mathematical Modeling
Prof. Neil Gershenfeld
with Scott Kirkpatrick and Luis Lafuente Molinero
Spring 2008
Mondays 1:00-4:00 E15-135

This course will survey levels of description for mathematically modeling real and virtual worlds, covering the development and application of analytical, numerical, data-driven, and dynamical models. The focus this semester will be on new material from the second edition of the course text:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521570954

The anticipated schedule is:

2/11 introduction, programming languages, graphics
2/19 ordinary difference and differential equations
2/25 finite differences: ordinary differential equations
3/3 finite differences: partial differential equations
3/10 finite elements
3/17 cellular automata and lattice gases
3/31 random variables and stochastic processes
4/7 function fitting
4/14 search
4/28 constrained optimization
5/5 convex classification
5/12 convex clustering and regression
5/19 final projects