Coursework forms 25% of the course marks. This will be distributed on
Thursday 13th October
The coursework is to be done in Maple 15. This is available on
the BUCS Windows terminal servers known as `gigaterms'. Note that the default Maple on the 'lcpu' machines is Maple 13, but Maple 15 can be accessed via 'maple15' or 'xmaple15'. As you may have seen, I had trouble with xmaple15 via Xming from Windows machines, but it seems to work fine from the Sunray thin client machines.
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, 2009, 2010 and 2011 papers from the Library web site. There was no 2007 paper. Note, however, that there is no guarantee that precisely the same topics are covered each year. The 2007/8 paper with answers can be found here. The answers to the 2008/9 paper can be found here. The 2009/10 paper can be found here, and with answers. The 2010/11 paper with answers and comments is also avaiable: note that question 4 was not covered this year.
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: it may change, but I will try to announce this, and note changes in the preface.
This paragraph describes 2010/1, and 2011/2 may well be different. I covered chapters 2 (2.1 to 2.3 in detail, 2.4 sketchily) and 3.1 (but only up to 3.1.6), 3.2 and 3.3 (up to 3.3.8) of the new book. In chapter 4 we covered modular g.c.d. (only the uni/bivariate 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 (sections 4.2.4/5/8). I also intend to cover section 4.1.4. In 2010/1 we did not do integration (chapter 5).
2011/2's converage to date can be found here.
Other books that you might want to read/consult are:
"Modern Computer Algebra" by von zur Gathen and Gerhard.
"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 on arithmetic and complexity).