This git repository contains course materials for MATH521 - Numerical Analysis of PDE, I have been teaching UBC. As of 2025 it has become a mixed FEM and spectral methods course. I will update/change the content throughout term and announce updates in class. Feel free to try it out but be aware that it might change throughout term.
- All materials are provided as Julia scripts or notebooks. To install Julia, follow the instructions at https://julialang.org. For 2025/26 I plan to use Julia 1.12.
- Clone this
gitrepository to your local computer, say to the folder.../math521. If you don't know how to use git, Atlassian makes some great tutorials. If you don't want to learn git, then you can also just download the repository, but it will make it awkward to update it. - You can setup your environment by starting Julia in the folder
.../math521, then start the Julia REPL, type]to switch to the package manager and then
activate .
up
Hopefully this should get you fully set up.
- Now press backspace to get back to the main REPL mode and type
using IJulia
IJulia.notebook() which should start a jupyter server and from there you can open the Jupyter notebooks.
(Alternatively, if you know what you are doing, you can open jupyter from any terminal by any process you wish.)
- If you haven't used Julia in the past, read the Get Started pages. There are also plenty of excellent tutorials as at
.../learning. - It is strictly speaking not required to learn Julia for this course. You can equally use Python (possibly also Matlab, but I'm less sure about that ...). If you port some of the course material to another language, let me know and maybe we can add it to the course pages.
- If the instructions in this readme are insufficient, confusing or incorrect, please file an issue or come to my office hour or make a PR to fix them.