A computer platform such as MATLAB allows us to deal with more complicated
and/or interesting problems than are accessible by hand. In this section
of MATH 241, you will be using a sequence of Microsoft Word-MATLAB notebooks
to learn about MATLAB and its applications to multivariate calculus. While
there will be occasional demonstrations in class, you will
need to invest some time in playing with these notebooks in order to gain
familiarity with MATLAB. You may also wish to attend a peer
training course in MATLAB. If so, you should act quickly as the courses
are only offered early in the semester. As an incentive, you have permission
to use MATLAB in connection with the homework problems assigned from Ellis
and Gulick. You should bear in mind, however, that you will be expected
to be able to work such problems on examinations without the help
of MATLAB. There will also be four explicit MATLAB assignments, the
details of which will be announced shortly.
In order to use the notebooks provided here, you will need both MATLAB and Microsoft word with the notebook interface enabled. This configuration is available at the following locations:
Here are links to the notebooks; the first few are already active; the rest will be activated shortly. The notebooks should be opened in Microsoft Word, which in turn will open MATLAB. While you can open them in place, it is probably best to save them first in your own workspace so that you can modify them and save your modifications.
Introduction
to MATLAB
Calculus
with MATLAB
Lines
and Planes
Curves
Surfaces
and functions of several variables
The
gradient
Critical
Points
Lagrange
multipliers
Double
integrals
Triple
integrals
Change
of variables
Line
integrals
Surface
integrals
Green's
theorem and Stokes' theorem
Some of these notebooks use m-files (MATLAB functions) that are not
supplied with MATLAB but have been created in this department. Here
is a link to a directory that contains those files. You should download
them to a directory on the computer you are using, to which you can give
MATLAB the path with an add path command.