ENGR108: Introduction to Matrix Methods

Instructors

Professor John Duchi, Sequoia 126.

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

Teaching Assistants

Calvin Sokk (head TA)

• Office hours: Thursday 9:30-10:30am and Friday 11:00am-12:00pm, both in Packard 104

Nicole Mulvey

• Office hours: Tuesday 5:00-6:00pm and Thursday 12:00-1:00pm, both in Packard 104

Emi Soroka

• Office hours: Monday 4:30 - 5:30pm in Packard 172 and Wednesday 10-11:00am in Packard 277.

Gary Cheng

• Office hours: Friday 12-2pm in Packard 109.

Section information

Midterm Review will be held on Friday's Sections on October 25th.

Calvin Sokk

• Section: Fridays, 9:30 - 10:20am in Pigott Hall, building 260 room 113 starting week 2.

Nicole Mulvey

• Section: Mondays 12:30 - 1:20pm in AllenX 338X starting week 2.

Emi Soroka

• Section: Tuesdays 3:30 - 4:20pm in Packard 202 starting week 2.

Gary Cheng

• Section: Fridays 2-3pm in Packard 202.

Course communication and questions

• The course staff email address is engr108-aut2425-staff@lists.stanford.edu. Please do not use the instructor's or TAs’ direct email addresses for matters related to the course.

• We will use Ed this quarter for answering questions, finding collaborators, and other course-related things. You should be automatically registered for Ed.

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 Thursday by 5:00pm 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.

• One midterm exams (in class, about halfway through the quarter). 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: the final will be closed book except that you may bring in one (1) sheet of paper, with material on the front and back.

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: 15%

• Final 25%

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