Cheg 258 - Lecture Notes - Mar. 17, 1999

Announcements

• The first hour exam has been graded. A stem and leaf plot of the results is given below:

  
  25 | 8
  30 | 1 0
  35 | 
  40 | 4 3 2
  45 | 9 6 6 9 8 6 8 7 9
  50 | 0 0 1 0 3 3 3 0 4 2 0 2
  55 | 7 8 8 5 6 7 8
  
  

  The mean was 48.9 +- 7.4. The class performance was excellent - I will have to make the next test more challenging! Those who were in the bottom group (the bottom three scores), however, are clearly missing much of the material and should see me. I would recommend that all students who were unhappy with their performance should talk to me or the TA's on a regular basis to be sure that they are mastering the material.

Class notes

The main points of the lecture were

• Multi-dimensional optimization

Goals:

• Set up and solve a multidimensional optimization problem.

Reading

• The class notes and Chapter 9 of Kahaner and chapter 8 of Hanna.

Question of the Day:

• Under what conditions does the method of steepest descent behave poorly?
• When will the method of steepest descent give us a better search direction than Newton's method?

Matlab Example Codes

example 22