[18335fall08] Welcome to 18.335

[Steven G. Johnson]

Hello gang,

I forgot to put the URL up on the board until some of you asked me  
about it after class, but the home page for the course this term is:

http://www-math.mit.edu/~stevenj/18.335/

The handout today was just a printout of this web page, which lists  
the basic information about the syllabus, grading, textbook, etcetera.

On the web site, after each lecture I will add a brief summary of what  
was covered, along with pointers to relevant readings in the text or  
elsewhere and links to any handouts.  (Today's lecture summary will be  
up shortly.)

As I mentioned in the beginning of today's class, as far as the  
numerical-linear-algebra content of the course we will be closely  
following the textbook in most cases (with a few exceptions, e.g. the  
text does not discuss memory efficiency). However, we will not be  
covering the material in the same order.  Today's material on Gaussian  
elimination starts in chapter 20 of the book, and from there we will  
work backwards to build up the tools that we need to analyze error  
characteristics and to branch out to other algorithms.

I will not review basic linear algebra except in the most cursor way;  
if you feel you need a refresher, I strongly recommend reading the  
first three chapters of the text (about 20 pages) by Friday.  The  
first five chapters of the book are available for free online if you  
have not purchased the text yet;

	http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/people/Nick.Trefethen/text.html

I highly recommend purchasing the text, which has become a classic in  
the field.

--SGJ
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