An Innovative Undergraduate Computational Mathematics Curriculum For Engineering Students Seeking Dual Major

In this paper, we discuss the design of a unique undergraduate curriculum in Computational Mathematics for students in the engineering fields who wish to pursue a dual major. At the institution that the authors teach, an undergraduate program in Computational Mathematics has been recently approved. The trend seems to be that most of the students wishing to pursue the degree program are engineering students interested in pursuing a dual major. The challenges faced by the department are 1) to offer these dual majors an integrated curriculum that would take advantage of their engineering background and 2) to offer a curriculum which will enable them to complete the degree within one additional year without compromising the integrity of the program. In this paper, the authors discuss in detail their Computational Mathematics curriculum and the modification of the curriculum for the dual majors. Introduction Computational Mathematics is a multidisciplinary field that applies the techniques of mathematics and computer science to solve the problems arising in natural and social sciences as well as various business and engineering fields. In recent years, the accessibility to high performance computers and affordability of low cost clusters of microcomputers have resulted in the surge of interest in development of new degree programs in the area of computational sciences at universities across the country