# MATLAB Assignment 1

Math 222 Spring 2018

You learned in class the Euler method for approximating a solution to the differential equation

Given an initial condition , the method gives a sequence of approximations using the recursion scheme

where and is the time step chosen by the user.

## Warm up

A simpler recursion relation would look like this

N = 10;
y = zeros(1,N+1);
y(1) = 0;
for j=1:N
y(j+1) = y(j) + j;
end
plot(0:N,y,'o')
xlabel('n');ylabel('y_n')


## The Euler method

Let's solve the problem

This has exact solution

tFinal = 2*pi;
N = 100;
h=tFinal/N;
t=linspace(0,tFinal,N+1); % type 'help linspace' to see how this works
y=zeros(1,N+1);
yExact=exp(1-cos(t));
y(1) = 1; % setting the initial condition
for n=1:N
y(n+1) = y(n) + h * sin(t(n))*y(n);
end
plot(t,y,t,yExact,'--'); xlabel('t'); ylabel('y'); title('Look, ma! I solved an ODE in MATLAB!');

error100= abs(y(N+1)-yExact(N+1));


That doesn't do so well, let's double the number of points and try again

N = 200;
h=tFinal/N;
t=linspace(0,tFinal,N+1); % type 'help linspace' to see how this works
y=zeros(1,N+1);
yExact=exp(1-cos(t));
y(1) = 1; % setting the initial condition
for n=1:N
y(n+1) = y(n) + h * sin(t(n))*y(n);
end
plot(t,y,t,yExact,'--')
xlabel('t'); ylabel('y'); title('Look, ma! I solved another ODE in MATLAB!');

error200= abs(y(N+1)-yExact(N+1));

fprintf('The error went down by a factor of  %f.\n',error100/error200);

The error went down by a factor of  1.953899.


Question 1: Apply the Euler method to solve

from to .

Cut and paste the above snippet of code into the MATLAB editor. Modify as necessary and save it as a .m file in order to do the following:

Note that this problem has exact solution

• Figure out what is the minimum value of N that you need to get an error smaller than 0.01 at the final time. Do this by experimenting with N until you get a small enough error.
• Plot the computed and exact solution using this value of N.
• Determine from this computation an approximate time at which attains its maximum and the approximate maximum value .
• How many digits of accuracy to you trust in this approximation?
• Show the method is approximately second order by doubling N and computing the ratio of the errors.

You should hand in a printout of your code, any figures you print, and a report of a few sentences answering all the questions.

Bonus Question 2 for the brave The Euler method is an example of a first order method. This means that the error is proportional to , so that doubling the number of points roughly cuts the error roughly by a factor of four.

The improved Euler method is what's known as a two-step method. It requires two evaluations of the function per time step. At each step, we define two extra quantities before computing

Program this method to solve the same problem from Question 1 and

• Determine how large N needs to be get an error less than 0.01.
• Show the method is second order by doubling N and seeing that the error has gone down by a factor of four.