COS 323 - Computing for the Physical and Social Sciences

Spring 2006

Assignment 4

• Assignment description as PDF
• The assignment asks you to implement Euler and fourth-order Runge-Kutta ODE solution methods.
  A reference for these is here.

Some clarifications about the assignment:

• It is not to be done in Matlab (but you can use Matlab's plotting tools).
• By peaks of the function (question 2) we are looking for both maxima and minima.
• For 2b), you can try dy/dt = cos(t) + 2sin(2t) to get a function with multiple peaks.
• Your implementation of Runge-Kutta does not need to follow the one in numerical recipes, which is made more efficient for adaptive step sizes.