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This book is designed to support a one-semester course in numerical methods. It has been
written for students who want to learn and apply numerical methods in order to solve problems
in engineering and science. As such, the methods are motivated by problems rather
than by mathematics. That said, sufficient theory is provided so that students come away
with insight into the techniques and their shortcomings.
MATLAB® provides a great environment for such a course. Although other environments
(e.g., Excel/VBA, Mathcad) or languages (e.g., Fortran 90, C++) could have
been chosen, MATLAB presently offers a nice combination of handy programming features
with powerful built-in numerical capabilities. On the one hand, its M-file programming
environment allows students to implement moderately complicated algorithms in a
structured and coherent fashion. On the other hand, its built-in, numerical capabilities
empower students to solve more difficult problems without trying to ?reinvent the
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