Math 445 exam 1 topics

Exam 1 (Thursday March 3, 2016 10:10-11:00am DeMeritt 240) will cover lecture and labs to date.

That said, I can list a few things about Matlab that you really must have a solid grasp on for the exam.

• Vectors and matrices: how to create them, how to access and set their elements, and how to perform mathematical operations with them.
• The difference between elementwise and linear algebra operations on vectors and matrices.
• How to set up and solve systems of equations using vectors, matrices, and the backslash operator.
• The colon operator: how to use it to specify sequences of numbers and access subvectors and submatrices.
• Plotting: how to make -plots of functions, how to label their axes, color the lines, display a coordinate grid, etc.
• Log-linear relations: how to make logarithmic plots, and how to infer a functional relation given a logarithmic or linear plot.
• for loops: how to repeat an action a number of times with a for loop.
• fprintf: how to do basic formatted output with fprintf.
• function: how to write your own functions.
• scripts: how to write scripts to perform a given sequence of commands.
• hamster dynamics / Google Page Rank: how to translate a graph of nodes and links to a transition matrix and then calculate the steady-state distribution.