The final exam is Wednesday 12/11/02, 4-6 pm. It is cumulative, covering chapters 1-4, sections 5.1 and 5.2, and your two projects.
You may use calculators or Mathematica on most problems. A few ask you to show your work done by hand.
The final exam contains 300 points and is worth 30% of your grade. About 80% of the exam consists of familiar problems of the type you have done in homework, including a proof. Each of these problems is worth 20 points, so you should know the material well. The remaining 20% consists of questions that test your understanding of concepts: explanations; making connections; new calculations; more proofs, some old and some new. Each of these problems is worth 6 points. You can miss a few without substantially changing your grade, but missing all will result in a B- at best. For all problems, partial credit will be considered when appropriate.
It is recommended that you look over Mathematica code for simple calculations. For example it will be helpful to know how to do these calculations both by hand and with Mathematica: matrix operations (such as multiplication), row reduction, determinants (only the 2 × 2 and 3 × 3 cases need be done by hand), solving systems of equations (both those with unique solutions and those with many), and eigenvalues and eigenvectors.
It would be prudent to know the Basic Theorem On Invertibility (p. 197).
fall 2002 course description
fall 2002 syllabus
project guidelines
Mathematica files
fall 2002 class profile
study tips
course evaluation form
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