The Computer Science department will be offering a new course this semester, CS177 Introduction to Scientific Computing, taught by Prof. Tim Hickey.  The course has no prerequisites and is designed for Science students interested in learning how to use Matlab and other tools to analyze data and simulate physical systems. It meets MWT 9-10 and there is still room for more students. The first part of the course will be an introduction to the lingua franca of the Scientific programming community:  Matlab/Octave. No programming background is assumed or required. The second part of the course will cover the use of Matlab/Octave to solve a variety of scientific problems using various techniques including statistical analysis, curve fitting, optimization, ordinary and partial differential equation solving, image processing, SVD and other matrix factorizations, 2d and 3d plotting. Students will also learn to use  a number of tools for collaboration and dissemination of scientific results including LaTeX for scientific papers, GIT for source code sharing, google docs for shared editing and google sites for dissemination of results. For more info see the course website https://sites.google.com/a/brandeis.edu/scientific-computing/home