Numerical Analysis – Take Home Exam II

It is now 12:56 AM and I'm putting the finishing touches on my Take Home Exam for Numerical Analysis. When is it due you may ask. No, you're wrong, it's not due tomorrow at 8:00 AM. It's due at 11:00 AM, so there :).

Yes, it’s due in a couple of hours. Did I just start it? Come on now, no I didn’t. I’ve just been procrastinating in finishing the last question. So I’ll have it in tomorrow and everything will be fine.

The topics covered in this exam were interesting. We’re doing Interpolation using Taylors Series, Lagrange Polynomials and Divided Differences. What is interesting about this class is that I’m taking it with a professor who is in love with Excel spreadsheets. Actually, his first love is Lotus, but since Excel is what we have on all the computers at school, he has little choice.

I’ve read the book and I’ve even searched online and I haven’t found anyone using his particular spreadsheet method of solving these things. It takes a little bit of work to set up the spreadsheet, but once you have it set up you simply substitute points for different questions and it spits out your answer. Pretty nifty if you ask me. I think he should fine tune this method and he might even get anothe research paper out of it. I would lend my assistance, but there are two things standing in my way:

  1. I don’t really like Mathematics that much
  2. This is my last semester and I have absolutely no free time.