Abstract:
There are a lot of problems in physic
which will finally lead to linear system problems.
Theoretically solving linear system is quite simple.
We can apply gauss elimination to do an Order 3 elimination work.
However, practically we never solve the linear system by ourselves
while the dimension is higher then 8.
In this pre-colloquium
we will show how the computer solve the linear system
and what is different between the answer from the computer
and the answer you compute by yourself.
We will introduce the basic direct method
and the basic iterative method
and focus on "Multifrontal"
which is a sparse direct method we are now working on.