ENGR108: Introduction to Matrix Methods

John Duchi and Babak Ayazifar, Stanford University, Fall 2023

Instructors

Professor Babak Ayazifar, Packard 263.

  • Office hours: TBD

Professor John Duchi, Sequoia 126.

  • Office hours: Wednesdays, 3:00pm – 4:00pm

Teaching Assistants

Mason Wang (head TA)

  • Office hours: Tuesdays 5-7 pm (Packard 104)

Julia Costacurta

  • Office hours: Wednesdays 12:30 - 2:30 pm (Packard 104)

Joshua Kim

  • Office hours: Tuesdays 3-5 pm (Packard 104)

Lycia Tran

  • Office hours: Mondays 1-3 pm (Packard 107)

Section information

Joshua Kim

  • Section: Thursdays 3-4 pm (Room 200-203)

Mason Wang

  • Section: Fridays 4-5 pm (Room 160-B40)

Lycia Tran

  • Section: Mondays 10-11 am (Room 100-101K)

Julia Costacurta

  • Section: Mondays 3-4 pm (Room 160-315)

Course communication and questions

  • We will use Ed this quarter for answering questions, finding collaborators, and other course-related things. You should be able to sign up at this webpage

Prerequisites

You do not need to have seen any linear algebra before; we will develop it from scratch. Math 51 is nominally a prerequisite, but we will use relatively little of this material. In the course you'll do some very simple programming in the language Julia, so you should have seen some very basic simple programming. CS106A or equivalent (which is much more than you will need) is a prerequisite or corequisite. You do not need to know about any applications; we'll cover that in detail. Even if you have already seen all the material in the course (e.g., vectors, matrices, least squares) we encourage you to take it, because (we guess) you haven't seen it the way we will present it.

Course requirements

  • Attendance and weekly participation in class

  • Weekly homework assignments: we will normally assign homework each Thursday, which will be and due the following Wednesday by 11:59pm Pacific time. Late homework will not be accepted. You are allowed, even encouraged, to work on the homework in small groups, but you must write up your own homework to hand in and credit your other group members.

  • Two midterm exams (in class, one about 2/5 of the way and the other about 4/5 of the way through the course). The midterm will be closed book except that you may bring in one (1) sheet of paper, with material on the front and back.

  • Final exam: we will have a small final project, details to be determined.

Grading

We will weight the various parts of the class as follows:

  • Attendance/participation 5% (this will be a combination of your section participation and your Ed participation, weighting toward whichever you make more contributions to)

  • Homework 55%

  • Midterm 1: 15%

  • Midterm 2: 15%

  • Final 10%

We reserve the right to change the grading rubric at any point in time during the course.