MATH 416
Advanced Applied Linear Algebra Fall 2012
Division III Quantitative/Formal Reasoning
This is not the current course catalog

In the first N math classes of your career, it’s possible to get an incomplete picture as to what the real world is truly like. How? You’re often given exact problems and told to find exact solutions. The real world is sadly far more complicated. Frequently we cannot exactly solve problems; moreover, the problems we try to solve are themselves merely approximations to the world. We’re forced to develop techniques to approximate not just solutions, but even the statement of the problem. In this course we discuss some powerful methods from advanced linear algebra and their applications to the real world, specifically linear programming (and, if time permits, random matrix theory). Linear programming is used to attack a variety of problems, from applied ones such as the traveling salesman problem, determining schedules for major league sports (or a movie theater, or an airline) to designing efficient diets to feed the world, to pure ones such as Hales’ proof of the Kepler conjecture.