Lecture 1

Question 1

What is Scientific Computing?

Answer 1

Question 2

What are typical problems for scientific computing?

Answer 2

Question 3

What are the formula’s for absolute and relative error?

Answer 3

Note: these may be negative, but usually only absolute values are quoted

Question 4

What are the two types of errors?

Answer 4

1. Input errors
2. Computational errors

Question 5

What are three examples of input errors?

Answer 5

Question 6

What are three examples of computational errors?

Answer 6

Question 7

How can the total error be split into the two types of errors?

Answer 7

Question 8

What is a trunctation error and a rounding error?

Answer 8

Question 9

What are the forward and backward errors?

Answer 9

Question 10

When is a problem well-posed?

Answer 10

Question 11

What is the condition number?

Answer 11

Question 12

How can the condition number approximated?

Answer 12

Question 13

What does the concept stability mean?

Answer 13

Question 14

What does the concept of accuracy imply?

Answer 14

Question 15

How are floating point number stored?

Answer 15

Question 16

What is the concept of normalization?

Answer 16

Question 17

What is the number of floating points numbers that exist in a system?

Answer 17

Question 18

What is the meaning and formula of an overflow and underflow level of a floating point system?

Answer 18

Question 19

What are the two rounding methods?

Answer 19

Question 20

What is the unit roundoff? What does it imply?

Answer 20

Question 21

What is the specific definition for Python?

epsilon_mach

Answer 21

Question 22

What are subnormal floating point systems? Are they better?

Answer 22

Question 23

How are the different floating point operations managed?

Answer 23

Question 24

How can floating points operation errors be rewritten?

Answer 24

Question 25

What are cancellation errors?

Answer 25

Question 26

What are overflow errors?

Answer 26

Question 27

What is the IEEE double precision format?

Answer 27