This project will support the expansion of a computer laboratory which will be used to provide a setting in which students will gain insight into the nature of mathematical problems, the physical phenomena they represent, and the procedures used to study them numerically. It is being funded under the Instrumentation and Laboratory Improvement (ILI) Program, which has the goal of improving the quality of the undergraduate curriculum by supporting projects to develop new or improved instrument-based undergraduate laboratory and/or field courses in science, mathematics, or engineering. In particular, this project will consist of a coordinated program in numerical methods and differential equations which will make significant use of computational experimentation and graphics. The facility will be used to study dynamical systems, partial differential equations, and linear and nonlinear systems; the students will be introduced to nonlinear phenomena of recent interest, including chaos and strange attractors, arising from models of systems such as the weather, the heart, and the damped, driven pendulum.
