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====== Math 445 exam 1 topics ====== Exam 1 (Thursday March 3, 2016 10:10-11:00am DeMeritt 240) will cover lecture and labs to date. That said, I can list a few things about Matlab that you really must have a solid grasp on for the exam. * Vectors and matrices: how to create them, how to access and set their elements, and how to perform mathematical operations with them. * The difference between elementwise and linear algebra operations on vectors and matrices. * How to set up and solve systems of equations using vectors, matrices, and the backslash operator. * The colon operator: how to use it to specify sequences of numbers and access subvectors and submatrices. * Plotting: how to make $xy$-plots of functions, how to label their axes, color the lines, display a coordinate grid, etc. * Log-linear relations: how to make logarithmic plots, and how to infer a functional relation $y=f(x)$ given a logarithmic or linear plot. * **for** loops: how to repeat an action a number of times with a **for** loop. * **fprintf**: how to do basic formatted output with **fprintf**. * **function**: how to write your own functions. * scripts: how to write scripts to perform a given sequence of commands. * hamster dynamics / Google Page Rank: how to translate a graph of nodes and links to a transition matrix and then calculate the steady-state distribution. The exam will have around ten questions, some easy, some not so easy. For most questions, you will be asked to answer with Matlab code in correct syntax. E.g. **Problem 1:** (totally straightforward) Given a matrix $A$, write one line of Matlab code that would assign the 3rd row of $A$ into the variable $x$. **Problem 2:** (slightly tricky) Given a matrix $A$, write one line of Matlab code that convert the $j$th column of $A$ into a row vector and assign it to the variable $x$.
