CARMA Colloquium

1:00 pm

Tuesday, 3rd Apr 2012

V206, Mathematics Building


Prof Robert Corless

(University of Western Ontario)

First Encounters of a Chebfun Novice

Symbolic and numeric computation have been distinguished by definition: numeric computation puts numerical values in its variables as soon as possible, symbolic computation as late as possible. Chebfun blurs this distinction, aiming for the speed of numerics with the generality and flexibility of symbolics. What happens when someone who has used both Maple and Matlab for decades, and has thereby absorbed the different fundamental assumptions into a "computational stance", tries to use Chebfun to solve a variety of computational problems? This talk reports on some of the outcomes.