Conjugate Gradients via Mathcad Plus 6

T study was motivated primarily by the author’s interest in numerical methods at both a teaching and research level. Much has already been written about “standard” Mathcad 6 and the purpose of this article is to focus on, and use, some of the features of Plus 6 which are not available in the standard version. In particular the use of the programming facility, which comes with Plus 6, is illustrated by an implementation of the preconditioned conjugate gradient method. Some familiarity with the standard version of Mathcad 6 is assumed throughout this article.