Completing the series of blog posts on the histories of mathematicians whose theorems we have learned, here are some interesting historical tidbits on Carl David Tolmé Runge and Martin Wilhelm Kutta of the (famously painful to derive as we are all aware of after our homework problem) Runge-Kutta Method.
 Carl Runge: 

Though originally enrolled at the University of Munich […]

Sidestepping somewhat from the field of Scientific Computing into statistics, I would like to present a small discussion as to why Least Squares is so widely used. Aside from it being easy to calculate and intuitively a good measure of best fit, there exist some really good properties about it.  
The problem of linear regression is […]

Throughout this course we’ve run into many examples of the peculiarities of doing mathematical calculations on computers: catastrophic subtraction, nested multiplication for efficient computation of polynomial sums, being unable to represent numbers smaller than machine precision, etc are just a few of the issues brought up in class.
Much of this stems from the fact that […]