Coursework forms 25% of the course marks. This will be distributed on
Thursday 22nd October
and can be found in
PDF.
The Maple worksheet is here.
It is due in two
tranches: Monday 16th November and Monday 14th December, by noon.
The coursework is to be done in Maple 13. This is available on
the BUCS Windows terminal server.
Probably the best Maple book is Essential Maple 7, by
Robert M. Corless (in the library short loan), but most Maple books will
do as long as they cover version 6 or later.
There are two user interfaces to Maple: `classic worksheet' and `standard'. See
Wikipedia
for comments.
Further advice on Maple can be obtained from myself.
The 2003 exam paper and solutions can be found here, and the 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2009 papers from the Library web site. There was no 2007 paper. The 2007/8 paper with answers can be found here.
The main text book is Computer Algebra by Davenport, Siret and Tournier (Addison-Wesley). This is unfortunately out of print, but an online version can be found in PostScript and PDF. Like most academics, I am not satisfied with the book, and am writing a better one. The state so far can be found in PDF.
This paragraph describes 2008/9. Last year I covered chapters 2 (2.1 to 2.3 in detail, 2.4 sketchily) and 3.1 (but only up to 3.1.4), 3.2 and 3.3 (up to 3.3.8, and 3.3.10) of the new book. We started (20.11.2008) on chapter 4 of the old book. In chapter 4 we covered modular g.c.d. (only the univariate cases in any detail), the Cantor-Zassenhaus algorithm for factoring polynmials mod p, and the problems faced in scaling this up to factoring over the integers. On 4.12.2008 we started integration (chapter 5 of the old book). The Maple worksheet introducing this is here. We covered section 5.1.1-5.1.3 in detail, and 5.1.4 and 5.1.5 in outline (the statement, but not proof, of the decomposition lemmas, and the assertion that Hermite, now generalised to Hermite-Ostrowski, and Trager-Rothstein, generalised appropriately, still work). Informal statemet of the Risch differential equation problem (as in 5.2.1.1) and example showing that exp(-x^2) has no elementary integral.
Other books that you might want to read/consult are:
"Algorithms for Computer Algebra" by Geddes, Czapor and Labahn.
"Computer Algebra and Symbolic Computation: Elementary Algorithms" by
Joel S. Cohen.
"Computer Algebra Handbook: Foundations, Applications, Systems." ed.
Grabmeier, Kaltofen and Weispfenning.
"The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2 (chapter 4)" by Knuth (for the material in lectures 2 and 3).