CS 713: Differential Equations

Course Information:

Projects

Your grade in this course will essentially be determined by your work on some 4 or 5 Projects (classroom participation - at a minimum attendance - will also be considered in determining your grade). One of these is theoretical. The others are computational, the purpose of this note is to explain what is expected in a report on a computational project.

You are expected to write a report on your project. This report is to be written as though you expect it to be read by a person who can understand mathematics and computation but is not necessarily an expert in the course material. In particular, do not write this report for the professor whom you expect to know all about the problem. You might think of this report as written for a supervisor who is too busy to do all the work himself/herself. Or, you might think of this report as written for a fellow student in your home department who is not taking this course at this time.

You will be expected to exhibit your results via graphs - not a large output of numbers!!

You are expected to explain:

  1. The expressed purpose of the project
  2. The nature of the results
    1. Is there anything in these results which you find surprising, interesting or unusual?
    2. Can you explain your results, if so, do so!

In some cases we will have developed all of the theory necessary to explain your results by the time you undertake these computations.

In other cases, the theory will be developed later, or will be incomplete at the time you want to use it. You are expected to know whether or not you have a theory to explain your results or you don't have such a theory. And, if the theory is available, you are expected to use it to explain your results. If the theory has not yet been developed in class you are expected to do what you can to explain and illustrate what there is in these results which you find interesting, or confusing, or unpleasant, or very nice, etc.


Last modified: Tue Sep 1 11:03:12 1998 by David Parter on behalf of:
parter@cs.wisc.edu