ENGR108: Introduction to Matrix Methods

Instructors

Professor John Duchi, Sequoia 126.

• Office hours: Thursdays, 13:30 – 14:30 (126 Sequoia)

Teaching Assistants

Benjia Zhang (head TA)

• Office hours: Mondays 1-2pm (Packard 214)

• Section: Fridays 11am-12pm (Packard 202)

• Tutorials: Fridays 9-10am, 10-11am (Packard 104)

Chris Mohri

• Office hours: Thursdays 12-1pm (Packard 109)

• Section: Thursdays 1-2pm (Packard 109)

• Tutorials: Thursdays 2-3pm, 3-4pm (Packard 109)

Nora Menon

• Office hours: Wednesdays 1:30-2:30pm (Packard 107)

• Section: Wednesdays 12:30pm-1:30pm (Packard 107)

• Tutorials: Fridays 1-2pm, 2-3pm (Packard 109)

Felipe Areces

• Office hours: Wednesdays 11am-12pm (Packard 109)

• Section: Fridays 1pm-2pm (Packard 202)

• Tutorials: Thursdays 1-2pm, 2-3pm (Packard 106)

Glenvelis Perez

• Office hours: Tuesdays 2-3pm (Hewlett 101)

• Section: Fridays 3:30-4:30pm (Packard 202)

• Tutorials: Thursdays 2-3pm, 3-4pm (Packard 214)

Section information

Midterm Review will be held during Friday's Sections the week preceding the midterm.

Course communication and questions

• The course staff email address is engr108-aut2627-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 two (2) sheets 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 20%

• Midterm: 32.5%

• Final 42.5%

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