In order to encourage you in this, I will distribute two sheets in advance of each reading: one of highlights, and the other a worksheet.
There will generally be a brief quiz at the start of each class for which a new section is to be introduced, to check that you have looked over these materials and the section. See the assignment page to gauge when these quizzes will occur. So there will be a short quiz at the start of next class. If you've done the reading with the worksheet and highlights in hand, you should be fine.
Your project will be of your own choosing. You will need to find a topic (perhaps from one of the chapters that we won't be covering in this course), and illustrate how numerical techniques make life easy(ier). These projects will be posted on the web, so they will be in the form of a complete example. More details to come. If you're eager to get started, let me know: otherwise, I'd think of this as something to do in the second half of the course, once you've gotten your feet wet.
...students learn to identify the types of problems that require numerical techniques for their solution and see examples of the error propogation that can occur when numerical methds are applied. They accurately approximate the solution of problems that cannot be solved exactly and learn typical techniques for estimating error bounds for the approximations.
Have you, in your mathematical careers, encountered any problems that cannot be solved exactly?
To get us up to speed, I'm going to ask each of you to work on one of the review pieces of section 1.1 for Wednesday. Let's take a look at the assignment page to choose. Feel free to use homework problems to illustrate your topic.
The last time I taught this course, one of the students correctly deduced that this class could be subtitled "How I learned to use (and love) the Taylor Series expansion". Pay especially close attention to that one!