Math 21a Fall 2004 Mathematica Assignment 2

Hello and welcome to the second Mathematica Assignment!  In it you'll get to try your hand at solving the wave equation that we investigated during the PDE classes, as well as several other PDEs and a few ODEs (ordinary or single variable differential equations) as well. As was the case with the first lab, this one is also pretty straightforward - in the end you'll produce another scintillating Mathematica graph, one that shows the solution function u(x,t) for the wave equation, with initial conditions of your choosing.  The lab itself involves a lot of reading, both to understand the differential equations it presents, as well as to figure out the formatting necessary to make Mathematica solve differential equations, so it's the reading that will take more time than anything else you do here. 

To get started, you'll just need to download the Mathematica file Fall04Lab2PDE.nb  that you'll use to do the assignment.  Work your way through the assignment, and do the exercise marked in purple at the end of the Mathematica file. 

The due date for doing this assignment is this Friday, Novemeber 19th, at 5pm.  Please just print out your graph and drop it off in your CA's mailbox on the 3rd floor of the Science Center.  The CA mailboxes are all located in the black filing cabinet located to the left of room 310.  Working through the whole Mathematica file and doing the assignment itself will probably take on the order of an hour or so. 
 

For those of you who didn't already download your own copy of Mathematica, then please go to Downloading Mathematica for instructions on how to get Mathematica on your own computer. The computer labs in the basement of the Science Center (Unix, PC and Mac) all already have Mathematica installed, so if you aren't able to download Mathematica onto your own computer and get a password, you can just do the assignment in the Science Center instead. 

To download the Mathematica file for this assignment, click on the link below while holding down the shift key. Save the Mathematica file on your computer and open the file in Mathematica. (On a Mac or PC start up Mathematica and read in the file "Fall04Lab2PDE.nb" like in any other software applications, in Unix (Linux) just type "mathematica Fall04Lab2PDE.nb" in a x-terminal). This notebook was saved with Mathematica 5.0. It can be used with Mathematica 4.0 also (just ignore the warnings). 

Download 
Fall04Lab2PDE.nb 
Last update 11/12/2004