/computational-linear-algebra

Course Information

Introduction

I am Prof. Chad Topaz. Welcome to the public facing version of my Computational Linear Algebra course. This course is a minimalist recreation of the one I use on my own campus at Williams College. You can access most of the basic course materials here. Since this site is for public sharing, I have eliminated certain items related to surveying my students, performing course evaluation, student assessment, and so forth. I enthusiastically credit colleagues from my time at Macalester College: Tom Halverson, Danny Kaplan, David Shuman, and Lori Ziegelmeier. Their versions of a Computational Linear Algebra course have influenced my own course, and I’m grateful to them for sharing wisdom and materials.

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Citation

If you use this site as a student (for your own learning) or as an instructor (for teaching your own course) I would appreciate you letting me know so that I can track impact of the work I have done to create it. If you do adopt materials from this site, please make sure to credit me.

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In Development

This course site is perpetually in development. I regularly revisit my course materials in order to improve them.

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Errata

If you find any problems with course materials (a typo, code that doesn’t work, a broken link – anything at all) please let me know by contacting me here.

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Consulting/Speaking

I have built this public facing site as a free, shareable public good. If you are interested in assistance with technical/mathematical aspects of this course or related consulting, please contact me here. If you would like me to speak to your department/institution/organization about curriculum and/or pedagogy (of this course, or of anything else) then please see my Speaking page and contact me here.

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Course Syllabus

Rather than using a traditional text-based course syllabus, I use a rather concise graphical syllabus; see below. I designed this syllabus using Piktochart. A similar tool you could consider is Canva. Some details of this syllabus are not relevant for a broad public audience, but I include the full syllabus nonetheless in order to give a flavor of the course and the philosophy I bring to it.

Computational Linear Algebra Course Syllabus

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R Resources

This course uses the R programming language in the RStudio integrated development environment. RStudio Cloud is a free version of RStudio that you can run on any device that has an internet connection and a web browser.

Here are some help resources for R.

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Course Details

A few characteristics of my on-the-ground course include:

  • Ungrading
  • Flipped classroom style, including pre-class quizzes
  • Introductory activities that get students oriented to the course
  • Organization around weekly blocks of material
  • Substantial in-class small-group discussion

To enable you to make easy and flexible use of the resources here, I have eliminated most of these elements from this public facing version of the course. Essentially, what I am providing here is a core dump of materials I use. The materials are linked throughout the various course units. Additionally, you can access the raw materials in this respository’s subdirectories:

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Course Units

Getting Started

R Bootcamp

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How Computers Store Numbers

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Fundamentals of Linear Systems

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Solving Linear Systems

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Recap Exercise I

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Interpolation

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Least Squares I

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Least Squares II

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Eigenvalues I

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Eigenvalues II

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Principal Component Analysis

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Recap Exercise II

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