Humanity’s taming of fire was supposedly one of the defining moments in early human history. Ever since, people have retained their fascination with fire. People may not regularly use fire nowadays for heat or light but they still love it anyway. Why else would there be so much research on modeling it? Well, some models […]

So, there seem to be quite a few posts on the method of least squares lately, and for a reason. The method of least squares is used everywhere! Well maybe not quite, but it certainly has an illustrious history, as far as statistical methods go. It was first published in 1805 in Adrien-Marie Legendre’s
Nouvelles m´ethodes […]

So, in class so far we’ve learned about naive Gaussian Elimination, which doesn’t work if the rows are arranged badly. Section 7.2 explains a way to fix this problem: pivoting, which is a process to order the rows so that none of the coefficients on the diagonal (pivot elements) of the matrix are 0 when […]