Preface Preface
This is a very compact set of introductory Numerical Analysis lecture notes. Their main goal is to give to the reader an idea of what Numerical Analysis is by providing several elementary but significant examples in the main chapters of the field. It is still in a work-in-progress stage and it is meant mainly to be used by the students of MATH 164 at Howard University. The book is structured as follows. The first sections of each chapter present the chapter's content and include "alive code", namely code that runs in the page itself and whose output, including plots, is shown in the page after pressing the corresponding "Evaluate" button. The code can be (and is meant to be!) freely edited by the reader to see what happens after small modifications of the code -- in the author's opinion, the best way to learn programming is to mess with the code and see what happens at every change, kind of learning by "inverse scattering". The last section of each chapter is dedicated to a recap of the new MATLAB language syntax used in that chapter's code. The reference source for learning MATLAB is MathWorks' Help Center but, in the author's intentions, these recaps help the readers with low or none familiarity with the language to find the essential information needed to understand that section's code. The union of all recaps sections should enable the reader to write his/her own code to solve simple numerical problems by his/her own. Finally, we provide some exercises relative to the chapter's content. Roberto De LeoWashington, October 2021