Department of
Mathematics
and Statistics
Past Summer Project Descriptions
Tim Clem, Automatic Differentiation, Summer 05
Faculty Advisor: Dan Kalman
Automatic differentiation is a capability that can be built into
a
computer language. With this capability, a program that computes
the value
of a function f(x) will automatically also produce the value of f'(x)
as
a biproduct, with no additional programming required. In this
research project,
a couple of different implementations of this capability were compared
in
terms of execution speed. Tim was familiar with programming in
several langueages,
and wrote test programs in C++ and Lisp. He used these programs
to analyze
performance of the different algorithms. He also presented a
paper describing
his work at the Young
Mathematicians
Conference at Ohio State University.