About

About me: Hello, my name is Autar Kaw. My first name is pronounced exactly as the word avatar (do not wait to pronounce it right till the December 18, 2009 release of James Cameron’s 3-D film Avatar. My last name is pronounced just like the last syllable in Brokaw (yes Tom Brokaw).

I am a full professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of South Florida. I have been teaching a course in Numerical Methods for the last 21 years.

The course has gone through more changes and updates than any other course in our department. Somewhat of a constant was the use of the book by Chapra and Canale, but the book itself went through many changes.

For the last several years, we are now using our own book – Numerical Methods with Application. An abridged version is available in print via http://www.lulu.com. However, we can custom-build the book for you based on the contents of the website.

The programming language used in the class has gone thru changes also – FORTRAN, then VB, Maple and now Matlab.

In the beginning, we taught the course more as a math course with emphasis on developing FORTRAN subroutines for common numerical methods, but now it is taught in a hybrid manner with equal emphasis on numerical methods, applications, experiments and programming.

What is this blog about: This is a blog for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) undergraduates taking a course in Numerical Methods. The blog entries are generally motivated by questions that students ask me in class. My main motive is to explain some intricacies of numerical methods in plain English and non-acadamese language. Although this blog is not part of the current funded grant, bringing the blog to you would have been hard without the support of National Science Foundation and the College of Engineering at the University of South Florida.

You can find complete resources for the course at http://numericalmethods.eng.usf.edu.

These resources include

• background information,

• textbook on Numerical Methods

• textbook on Introduction to Matrix Algebra,

• power point presentations,

• worksheets in MATLAB, Maple, MATHEMATICA and MathCAD,

• multiple-choice tests

• anecdotes

• real world physical problems

• eBooks

• videos
  

• experiments

• blog

CONTACT INFO
Mailing Address:	Mechanical Engineering Department, University of South Florida, 4202 East Fowler Avenue ENB118, Tampa, FL 33620-5350
Office Phone	(813) 974-5626
Fax:	(813) 974-3539
Email:	kaw@eng.usf.edu
URLs:	USF WEBSITE: http://www.eng.usf.edu/~kaw NUMERICAL METHODS    Resources: http://numericalmethods.eng.usf.edu    Blog: http://autarkaw.wordpress.com    Videos: http://www.youtube.com/numericalmethodsguy PERSONAL WEBSITE: http://www.autarkaw.com