Lab Manuals

There are 5 lab projects that are part of the coursework in Math 216. You will have 5 meetings in the Instructional Computing Labs in the basement of East Hall, in place of your normal recitation meetings, on specific dates that are listed on the syllabus.

When you arrive in lab, you must bring with you, completed in advance, the corresponding prelab assignment. (Except for Lab 1 which has no prelab assignment.) During the lab period you will have an opportunity to use the computer system to work on the "in the lab" part of the assignment. A carefully prepared lab report, including all completed lab problems and a conclusions section, is due at a later date as indicated on the syllabus. If you do not finish the computer work in the hour you are in the lab, you will have the time between then and the due date to finish the work and prepare your lab report.

See also this page of tips for getting the most out of the Math Department Computer Labs. If you are not working in the Math Department labs and are on a computer that doesn't have dfield8 or pplane8, you can get them from Prof. Polking's website if you are using them at an educational institution. (If you put them in the directory in which you are working they will be visible to Matlab.)

• Lab 1: Graphical Solutions to First Order Differential Equations.
  Using dfield8 to study direction fields in Matlab.
• Lab 2: Euler's Method and RC Circuits
• Lab 3: Higher Order Numerical Methods and Superposition
  impEULER.m file: impEULER.m
  plotApprox.m file: plotApprox.m
  SuperPosn.m file: SuperPosn.m
• Lab 4: Solving Systems of Differential Equations and Using a Symbolic Solver
  lab4Euler.m file: lab4Euler.m
• Lab 5: Nonlinear Systems