Numerical Methods#
In my university (Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Science, University Politehnica of Bucharest, locally known as Facultatea de Automatică și Calculatoare (CTI), Universitatea Politehnica București), we study Numerical Methods in the second semester of the first year.
Suffice it to say, it is a tough course, involving lots of math and providing a way different experience to first year students.
I liked it a lot! But very few dared to say the same, which made me wonder if I could be of any help. In my case, since I've had the opportunity to learn from Prof. George‑Pantelimon Popescu, I thought there was no harm in asking him if I could be a lab assistant next year - to my pleasant surprise, he agreed.
I want to empasize that I would have no interest in numerical methods if it weren't for Prof. George‑Pantelimon Popescu and Asst. Prof. Bogdan Mocanu.
The Numerical Methods book#
In the beginning, there was a student who simply wanted to learn to pass a few exams. To do so, he wrote a list of formulae in a \(\LaTeX\) document. However, he soon realized that wasn't enough and a few explanations alongside the math would help a lot.
The list became longer and longer, until it spanned on \(30\) pages. His friends, intrigued, were also interested to get their hands on a copy - that's when it hit me: "This has the potential to become a book!"
It was never intended to be profitable, I just wanted to help myself and the other students. Unfortunately, this also means it was written in my native language, Romanian.
Even if I had plans to translate it at some point, it would take me a lot of time and effort, so an English version shouldn't be expected any time soon.
The project will be built using two tools written from scratch (both open-source software):
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GoBG, a book generator written in Go;
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IMD1, a very customizable Markdown-like specification and a Go implementation custom tailored for it that can convert from IMD1 to both HTML (working) and \(\LaTeX\) (a little buggy at the moment).
The book will be available for free by the end of this semester. You can check out its progress right here - it is already complete, but it needs some love and some polishing!
Teaching as a lab assistant#
My teaching experience actually began with this subject; in the Spring of 2022, I taught freshmen the beauty of Numerical Methods via my laboratories.
For more info, please refer to the original article.
Homework checker#
In order to check the correctness of a student's homework, I've automated the process. The checker was used in 2022 for the first Numerical Methods homework.
For more info, please refer to the original article.