Instructor
Abbas Alhakim
361B Science Center
Tel. 268-3831
aalhakim@clarkson.edu
Office Hours: 11:00 AM --12:00 PM  MWF, 11:00 AM --1:00 PM on Tuesday, or by appointment.

Lectures
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 
12:00 noon to 12:50 pM
Room: Science Center 354

Text
  Linear Algebra for Engineers and Scientists using MATLAB by Kenneth Hardy.

Organization:
Material will be presented primarily in the form of lectures and  reading assignments from the text. Lectures will cover the points to be learned and will direct your study from the text, however some material will be presented in class that may not be in the text. Thus, you should attend class, pay attention while there, and take notes over the material. You should plan on at least one hour of study outside the class for every lecture. The material in the latter part of the course will be havily based upon material presented in the first part of the course, therefore you will have to commit the material to long term memory. In addition, the final exam is comprehensive.

Homework and Assessment
Homework will be assigned regularly in class, (a collection of exercises will be recommended for each section we cover).  It is your responsiblity to do all assigned problems, and to check that they are correct. A graded homework assignment, in the form of a small project, will be given roughly every two weeks, a part or all of the assignment will be done using MATLAB (MATLAB should be used to cross-check all calculations). Collaboration between students is healthy and is encouraged, however every student is required to submit his/her own work, whenever a homework or project is due. Copying a homework is cheating.

Course Objectives
  The aim of this course is help you:

• understand the basic concepts of linear algebra, including the solution of linear systems, the algebraic operations on vectors and matrices, determinants, bases, dimension and eigenvalues and eigenvectors (this is basically the core material of  chapters 1 through 7).
  
• A handfull of applications of linear algebra to various fields of science will be presented in order to illustrate the importance of this topic, these will be selected from the Applications section at the end of each chapter.
  
• get basic skills using the outstanding  package MATLAB, which itself will make learning linear algebra fast, easy and fun, as it will allow the student to both do calculations faster and do much more calculations than one is capable to do manually, thus providing more insight about a large number of cases and more time to focus on the concepts.
  

Test Dates(tentative):
Test1: February 17^th
Test2: March  24^th
Final Exams Week: May 1-5.

Grading
Your grade will be determined based upon the total points earned on examinations, homework and (possibly) quizzes, There is no provision for doing extra or outside work to improve your grade(i.e. on an individual basis). The grading distribution is as follows:
Homework............................................30%
Classroom Test I...................................20%
Classroom Test II..................................20%
Final Exam.............................................30%

The letter grade will only be given at the end of  the term using the weight described above and following the rule:
A: 90.0 --100%
B: 80.0 -- 89.9%
C: 70.0 -- 79.9%
D: 60.0 -- 69.9%
Below 59.9%: good luck next time.

Contents

Section(s)	Number of Lectures (tentative)
1.1 --1.3	7
2.1 -- 2.4	8
3.1 -- 3.4	8
4.1 -- 4.5	7
6.1 -- 6.3	5
7.1 -- 7.2	time permitting

Some Advice
1) Don't fall behind, study the material on a lecture by lecture basis, you will see that every lecture depends on the previous material.
2) Do all the assigned homework. This is an integral part of the course.
3) Make use of the resources that are at your disposal: textbook, extra material, and above all your professor's office hours.
4) Everybody is expected to attend the lectures. The material is a combination of theory and calculation, and it is necessary to understand the theory in order to do sensible calculations and interpret them correctly.
5) Students are expected to stick to the Clarkson's   Code of Ethics.    Any violation to this code will not be tolerated, a violator will be given a failing grade on the assessement concerned (at best).