“ In mathematics, you don’t understand things, you just get used to them.” - John von Neumann

Free flight is one of the most common subjects of sweet dreams; just as falling is the frequent stuff of nightmares. And yes, we learned to fly; we achieved the dream and it has proved dust and ashes. Ironically enough, everything about human flying is the antithesis of what we dream of. Aeroplanes are noisy, cramped, polluting – they scratch the surface of the blue ceiling and break up the silence of the night.

] Prof.Trefethen David Bau Prof Lloyd N.Trefethen and his student, David Bau have neatly organized all aspects of numerical linear algebra in to a set of 40 lectures. Each lecture revolves around one specific idea. I will try to summarize the key points of these lectures. Every person who has solved any real life math fin problem knows that the classic numerical algebra is dead. Iterative methods are almost always used for finite difference methods, solving pde’s, optimization.

Via Kiran ( Snow storm that has blanketed Pennsylvania!) :

Gene Golub’s Obituary written by Professor Lloyd N. Trefethen( Oxford) : A century ago, matrices and the techniques for their manipulation — linear algebra — were a backwater of mathematics. Today, they are the foundation not just of the mathematical field of numerical analysis,but also of computational science and engineering, and have become indispensable for anyone who wants to get numerical results from a computer. The pre-eminent figure in matrix computations over the past 50 years, Gene Golub, died on 16 November,2007.