About


About me: Hello, my name is Autar Kaw. My first name is pronounced exactly as the word avatar (just like 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 23 years.

The numerical methods course has gone through more changes and updates than any other course in our department.   In the 19990s, I 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, real-world applications, experiments and programming.  The programming language used in the course has also gone thru changes – FORTRAN, then VB, Maple and now MATLAB.

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

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

Autar Kaw
Professor, Mechanical Engineering Department,
University of South Florida
4202 E Fowler Ave ENB118, Tampa FL 33620-5350.
Numerical methods for STEM undergraduates: http://numericalmethods.eng.usf.edu/
A Blog for Numerical Methods: http://autarkaw.wordpress.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/autarkaw
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/numericalmethodsguy
Twitter: http://twitter.com/numericalguy
University: http://www.eng.usf.edu/~kaw
Official Website: http://www.autarkaw.com
Lulu: http://lulu.com/kawautar  
E-mail: kaw@usf.edu

7 Responses to About

  1. thank you for your post
    it’s great job :)

  2. I wish I had a teacher like you :D

  3. Professor Kaw, if it was not for your site i would have been lost in this course. Thank you very much for imparting your knowledge so ordinary student like me can undestand Nuemerical Methods. keep up the good work . Thanks again

  4. Hello Dr. Kaw I think your lectures are outstanding! I know you focus mostly on solving ODE’s numerically but could you give any reference to a site for solving PDE’s numerically?

  5. Hello, Mr. Kaw.

    My name is Andrei and I really appreciate your work. Rather complex notions are presented in a simple and intuitive fashion.

    Keep up the good work.

    Andrei from Romania

  6. Hi Autar, thank you for your really nice blog. Recently I also started a scientific computing blog, if you are interested. The url is http://www.particleincell.com/blog. Most of my examples are in Java but I do have few codes in Matlab. I am finding that most visitors to my blog are using Matlab however I generally do my development in Java since it’s much faster, so that’s why. But Matlab is a really great “tinkering” environment.

  7. Thank you so much..
    Excellent insight and clarity. :) :)

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