 Hello and welcome to this course on MATLAB programming for numerical computations. My name is Dr. Nikit Kaisere, I am from Department of Chemical Engineering at IIT Madras. This course primarily focuses on using MATLAB for numerical programming basically for numerical programming that is of interest to engineers. The learning objectives for this course are listed over here. Basically this is a MATLAB programming course. We are going to start off with basics of MATLAB programming. The primary aim of MATLAB is to solve numerical computation problems of interest to engineers. So we are going to use this course to understand the numerical methods in context of how we are going to use them in context of how we are going to use them in MATLAB. And we are then going to use MATLAB to solve some of these computational problems. About MATLAB, MATLAB is a high level programming language, it is widely used for computation analysis in controls, signal processing, communications and other fields. MATLAB is a combination of the words matrix and laboratory. The link for MATLAB website is given over here, it is called mathworks.com. MATLAB is one of the more popular computational software, commercial computational software out there. It is rated as one of the top 10 computational softwares in the world today. It is fairly popular in engineering, control, finance, image processing and some of the other fields. It has toolboxes which are geared towards engineering, controls, finance and image processing. What are the prerequisites for this course? Since this course is an introductory course on MATLAB programming, there are not too many prerequisites. We will basically assume some basics of linear algebra and calculus that is usually covered in your first year undergraduate. Besides that, there are no other prerequisites for the course. However, some of the other things which are good to have would be some background or some knowledge of computational or numerical techniques would be useful. Usually, this numerical techniques course is done in second year of a typical undergraduate course. So, it will be very useful if this particular MATLAB course is done after that. However, that is not a prerequisite. You can indeed do this particular course once you have finished some introductory linear algebra and calculus courses in math. Some prior background in programming will be useful, but again in this course we are not going to make any assumptions with respect to prior background in programming. The software that will be used in this course is primarily MATLAB. Again the website for MATLAB is given over here. If MATLAB is not available in your college, you can alternatively use SILAB. SILAB is an open source software that is somewhat similar to MATLAB. Most of the things that we are going to cover in this course are also available in SILAB. And if MATLAB is not available to you, I highly recommend downloading the free software SILAB and trying out the examples using SILAB. There are some minor differences between MATLAB and SILAB, but the primary use of SILAB is similar to MATLAB. Assignment problems will be set using MATLAB's own coursework website. The link for this website will be given to you in the due time. We will use this website in order to have assignment problems given to registered student on this course. The book that I highly recommend for this course is the book by Professor Lorian Fosett called Numerical Methods Using MATLAB. It's a book that we are primarily going to follow in this course. Other recommended textbooks are the textbooks on numerical methods by Professor Chapra and Professor Kanal and the numerical methods for chemical engineering textbook by Professor S.K. Gupta. This course is general purpose course for people with engineering and science background. So we are going to take up examples which are general in nature. A related course to this course is the computational techniques course where I have covered theoretical aspects of numerical methods that we are going to cover in this MATLAB programming course. However, we are not going to use any of the theoretical aspects of these computational methods. We are primarily going to study how to implement these computational methods in MATLAB. And finally, I come to the course overview. This course will be delivered in eight weeks and in eight modules. Each module will be covered in one week. The first week or the first module will cover introduction to MATLAB, which we will follow by approximations and errors that we encounter in numerical programming. This will be followed by numerical differentiation and numerical integration. Then we will cover solving linear equation using numerical techniques. Then we will follow it with non-linear equations. Regression and interpolation will be covered in the sixth week. And the seventh and eighth week of this course will cover ODE, Ordinary Differential Equations, Initial Value Problems. With this, I come to the end of this introduction. I hope you will follow this course in order to learn MATLAB programming. Thank you and see you in module one. Bye.