Primary acknowledgements

I would first like to thank Dan Busuioc, who was my first teaching assistant in this course back in Fall of 2002. He suggested the idea of teaching the course by first introducing a set of tools, and then applying those tools to find numerical algorithms for various problems. I really appreciate this approach, and I believe that this is quite novel in the literature, as most text books start by immediately jumping into approximating solutions using algorithms like Newton's method.

Second, I would very much like to thank Christoph W. Überhuber, who wrote the text book "Numerical Computation 1", which is available for purchase at the Spring website at this website. While this text book focuses more on the software and analysis, he is the individual who inspired me to divide the course material based on the four categories of approximating the

• value of an expression,
• solution to an algebraic equation or system of algebraic equations,
• solution to an analytic equation or system of analytic equations, and
• solution of an unconstrained optimization problem.

As I recall, this list formed one small section of this text book, specifically a list in Section 2.2.2 Categories of Numerical Problems, where the first is actually described as "The evaluation of a functional," however, that is a description I found, while entirely appropriate, rather sub-optimal for a 2nd-year electrical and computer engineering course.

Unfortunately, Christoph passed away in 2016 at the age of 70, and I was not able to thank him personally. I doubt he intended those four lines to make any significant impact on someone else. He taught at the Technical University of Vienna, which you can read more about at Wikipedia. He is one of the original authors of the QUADBACK library for numerical integration of real-valued functions of a real variable. I could not, initially, find more information about this author previously as the name on the text book is highly anglicized to Christopher W Ueberhuber; hence, this acknowledgement appears quite late into the development of this course (June 2021).

Additional acknowledgements

I would also like to acknowledge the help of:

• Anurag Anand Devadiga for numerous worthwhile suggestions and corrections.
• Tazik Shahjahan for creating a list of errors in the slides
• Juliette Rocco for suggestions and criticisms
• Jessica Bertley for suggestions and criticisms