Numerical Analysis topics on GRE?

Forum for the GRE subject test in mathematics.
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sawyerjack
Posts: 1
Joined: Sat Oct 06, 2018 1:30 am

Numerical Analysis topics on GRE?

Post by sawyerjack » Sat Oct 06, 2018 1:37 am

A few quick questions for those who have taken the test. The ETS booklet mentions numerical analysis as a possible 'additional topic'. Anyone have a good idea what topics such question(s) would cover? More practically, is there a book out there which has the necessary info contained in the first three chapters and 30 exercises? :lol: Same questions for 'algorithms,' which were also mentioned. With regards to latter, there's a classic computer science book out of MIT called Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson et al. Thinking about tackling first few sections of that one just to cover my bases, make sure I'm more comfortable with notation/complexity questions... thoughts?

Many thanks!

djysyed
Posts: 359
Joined: Sat Oct 28, 2017 9:59 pm

Re: Numerical Analysis topics on GRE?

Post by djysyed » Sat Oct 06, 2018 5:55 pm

The algorithm is some very basic pseudo-code question. I've never seen a numerical analysis question in the two times I've taken it

BCLC
Posts: 36
Joined: Mon Oct 24, 2016 1:10 am

Re: Numerical Analysis topics on GRE?

Post by BCLC » Sun Oct 07, 2018 11:06 pm

Re numerical analysis:

At most newton's method or linear approximations from Calculus textbooks eg Stewart. Of course there's the higher linear algebra that you would learn in a numerical analysis/scientific computing course like maybe 'positive definite' or when the trace of a matrix equals its rank or even possibly matrix differentiation, but I don't believe there's anything there about flops, Cholesky, LU, SVD, etc

Re algorithms:

I have a feeling the chapter in Rosen's Discrete Mathematics covers it.

hido
Posts: 10
Joined: Sat Jul 07, 2018 1:49 pm

Re: Numerical Analysis topics on GRE?

Post by hido » Tue Oct 09, 2018 1:08 pm

I think it's better to work on more common topics unless you're already very confident with them. In most of the practice tests I found online (official/unofficial), I see at most one question in programming. I'm not sure if reading a few chapters just for one problem is cost efficient.

It's pretty much guaranteed that there will be many Calculus questions, so I would personally spend more time there.

cater99
Posts: 16
Joined: Mon Apr 30, 2018 1:29 am

Re: Numerical Analysis topics on GRE?

Post by cater99 » Wed Oct 10, 2018 9:27 pm

As I have seen so far any algo question is made simple enough that people don't need to know any formal programming language or even MATLAB to read it. The most common type of question could be ask you to manually find a few inputs or to tell when does it terminate.



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