• Exercise one covers relative versus absolute addresses and graphing equations.
• Exercise two introduces Excel's array functions for transposing, multiplying and inverting matrices.
• Exercise three uses the array functions for solving simultaneous equations and fitting lines to linear data.
• Exercise four demonstrates Excel's LINEST() function for least squares. Here's my answers (later).
• Exercise five: Spherical trigonometry and non linear least squares to locate epicenters.

  Auxiliary exercises, old exercises, some examples:

  • Erosion and landscape evolution
  • Stereonet on a spreadsheet
  • 3-Point problem. Given three points (x, y,z) of a stratigraphic unit find the dip vector. Given the bearing and plunge of a drill hole find the apparent thickness of a bed whose dip vector is is known.
  • Flood frequency requires importing ASCII data, sorting, MEDIAN(), and AVERAGE.

• Exercise 1: Downloading, importing and manipulating 3-arc second USGS DEMs; calculating the volume of Lake Missoula.
• Exercise 2: Acquiring and displaying Montana's 30-meter DEMs and the USGS' 30-meter DEMs.
• Exercise 3: Acquiring DLGs and combining them with 30-meter DEMs to produce index maps.
• Exercise 4: Gridding and contouring random data: problems and pitfalls.
• Summary Exercise: SURFER and Excel, putting it all together.
• Auxiliary information and exercises
  • Creating SURFER grids with Excel; includes an example from landscape evolution.

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GRAPHER(C): 2D plotting

GRAPHER(C), from Golden Software, Inc., is a very flexible graphing package that gives you much more control over your graphs than does Excel. Besides allowing a larger variety of graphs, GRAPHER handles larger data sets, interfaces well with SURFER if you want to extract and plot profiles, and includes built-in smoothing and statistical functions. Given your experience with SURFER,GRAPHER should seem somewhat familiar.

• Exercise 1: Extracting a profile from a SURFER grid and plotting it with GRAPHER.

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MATHCAD(C): Calculation, Curve Fitting, Nonlinear Regression, and Fourier Analysis.

Mathcad combines the live document interface of a spreadsheet with the WYSIWYG interface of a word processor while allowing you to solve just about any math problem you can think of. You can place equations, text, and graphics anywhere in the Mathcad worksheet. This makes it easy keep track of the most complex calculations and represent your results in two or three dimensional plots.

Exercise 1: Introduction to Mathcad, its use as a calculator and for evaluating and graphing functions.
Exercise 2: The inverse approach, curve fitting by nonlinear regression.
Exercise 3: More nonlinear regression and using Mathcad to analyze and visualize 3D data.
Exercise 4: Using a difference equation to model conductive cooling of a dike and for a sill; Mathcad's animation.

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For background information and additional problems:

• A Guide to Microsoft Excel for Scientists and Engineers, B.V. Liengme, John Wiley and Sons, 1997, 207 p.
• Introduction to Linear Algebra in Geology, J. Ferguson, Chapman & Hall, 1994, 203 p.
• Numerical Analysis for the Geological Sciences, J.R. Carr, Prentice Hall, 1995, 592 p.
• Linear Algebra, Geodesy, and GPS, G. Strang & K. Borre, Wellesley-Cambridge Press, 1997, 694 p.
• Statistics and Data Analysis in Geology, 2nd edition, J.C. Davis, 1986, John Wiley and Sons, 646 p.
• Introduction to Geological Data Analysis, A. Swan & M. Sandilands, Blackwell Science, 1995, 446 p.

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Introductory material: course structure

The venue for this course is Science Complex 11, a joint Geology-Physics teaching room equipped with a computer for each student. Currently we have facilities for fourteen students.

• Take a look at the course description to see where we might go this semester.
• If you want to know a little about the overall setup of a networked computer system, including some definitions and explanations, check out Alden Wright's page for his CS 487 course. And, if you want some upper-level information on scientific computing, take a look at Don Morton's web page for his Scientific Computing course.
• The Geology Department at the University of Oklahoma has a good write up on bits, bytes, programming and computer hardware.

So far the most convenient and expedient way to distribute the information seems to be to provide the material in Adobe's .PDF format. Thus these exercises and notes are provided as .PDF files and you need Adobe's free Acrobat Reader installed in your browser to view them.

If your browser is not currently set up to read and print such files, download Acrobat Reader from Adobe's web page, close your browser (preferably version 4.0 or greater of MS Internet Explorer or Netscape), install the reader, restart your browser, click on one of my links pointing to a set of notes or problems, and Acrobat Reader should pop up with the .PDF file.

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