Exam 2 (Thursday April 7, 2016 10:10-11:00am DeMeritt 240) will cover lecture and labs to date, with emphasis on labs 6 through 9.

You should be familiar with the mathematics and implementation in Matlab code of the following topics

• hamster dynamics / Google Page Rank
• solving nonlinear equations with Newton's method
• Monte Carlo methods for modeling coin flips and elections
• 1d, 2d, and 3d graphics

For example, for nonlinear equations and Newton's method, you should understand how to derive the Newton iteration equation for improving an approximate solution to the nonlinear equation , and you should be able to write a Matlab function that would implement the Newton method for a given function and an initial guess .

You should have a good grasp on Matlab syntax we've covered to date. The exam will focus more on recent material:

• plotting commands: meshgrid, pcolor, contour, surf, surfc, quiver, and colorbar
• anonymous functions: how to define and use them
• random numbers: rand and randn
• for loops

But there will be a few questions on old material as well:

• 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 linear 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.
• fprintf: how to do basic formatted output with fprintf.
• function: how to write your own functions.