Spring 2006

Overview

Love and marriage. Battles and wars. Drugs and disease. Fun and games. These are not the subjects that most people think of when asked "How is mathematics used in the real world?" In this course, we will see how mathematics can be used to study all these topics and more.

This is a course on mathematical modeling. The problems that we will study are dynamic: time, either continuous or discrete, is the independent variable. Applications will be drawn largely from the social and biological sciences.

• MATLAB Notes
• A brief note about numerical error.
• Lecture Notes: Modeling
• Lecture Notes: Solow's Economic Growth Model
• Lecture Notes: First Order Differential Equations: Solved Problems
• Lecture Notes: Interacting Populations and the SI Model of Epidemiology
• Lecture Notes: Dimensional Analysis (The first section is about Second Order DEs.)
• Lecture Notes: Linear Algebra Shortcuts for 2x2 Matrices
• Lecture Notes: The Lanchester Battle Model
• Lecture Notes: Planar Linear Systems
• Notes on Using PPLANE
• Nonlinear Map Demonstration Using Scilab
• Defining a big (but sparse) matrix in Matlab or Scilab