MAT 331

Math 331: Mathematical Problem Solving with Computers
Professor Sutherland, with B. Hinkle and J. Latschev
Fall 1996

Things to read

A description of the course, including grading policies, text (there is none), etc.
Useful information about using maple can be found in various places on the web, including a nice collection of some stock answers to maple questions at MIT, a collection of maple resources (including a tutorial or two) at Indiana University, the Maple lab manual from Worcester Polytechnical Institute, and, of course, the home of Maple at Waterloo Maple Software.
Here are a few things we handed out about unix in Postscript. You might also care to browse the UNIXhelp tutorial, or sections of UNIX is a four-letter word, both of which have tutorials.
Maple worksheets related to things we did in class. (Most of these are available in several formats. Click on thefor a Maple worksheet, onfor PostScript, or on for a plain text file.)

Adaptive plotting, and in particular graphing y=sin(1/x) ( , .)
2D parametric plots. (, .)
Using tubeplot (.)
Doing a least-squares fit of a line to data (, ) and of a cubic to data (.)
Making fractals with Maple.
- The Sierpinski Gasket (, )
- A space-filling Peano curve (, )
- A fractal sitting in R^3, namely a Sierpinski pyramid (, )
- A function with a self-similar, fractal graph )

Things from around the WWW about fractals. See Fractals for Beginners, maybe the fractal FAQ or even Exploring Fractals (There are plenty more where those came from, but be forewarned: there are lots of pages with many mathematically incorrect statements on the web. The above documents are mostly correct, though some statements should be taken with a grain of salt).