Scientific Computing with J. Nathan Kutz

Key Takeaways

Hi, my name is Nathan Kutz and I'm professor and chair of applied mathematics at the University of Washington. I'm here to tell you a little bit about scientific computing and the course that you're looking at right now. This course was developed over a decade ago at the University of Washington to address the needs of the students in the engineering, physical, and biological sciences. In particular today, it's very difficult to do any kind of scientific work without having computational fluency. The course tries to highlight the major themes and techniques used mathematically from such diverse fields as biology to physics. It is the first of three courses offered by to Corsera from applied mathematics. This course being scientific computing, the second course being data analysis and the third course being high performance computing. combined together, they offer a wonderful uh survey of the methods and techniques in scientific computing. What's needed for this course is a strong background in linear algebra, differential equations, and some background in algorithm and programming development. With those skill sets and a lot of work, you can work your way through and cover the major themes and techniques mathematically that allow you to solve some of the world's most complex problems. In fact, the challenges posed by today's modern computation such as solving for how neurons interact in the brain for doing computation and functionality or solving for very complex systems such as predicting weather or climate changes are the kind of things that we are after in doing scientific computing. I hope you'll join me in this course. I think you will find it to be a wonderful experience and that you will learn a great many of mathematical techniques and cutting edge methods that you can use and apply across a great range of science.