Abstract:

Virtual laboratories (VL) represent valuable tools for the transmision of the scientific knowledge. In the context of the nowadays university teaching, VL offers the technical career students numerous options of self-teaching.
In this work, a new virtual laboratory has been developed by using the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of MATLAB. This interface allows the geometric description of the Nelder-Mead method for the minimization of a scalar field in R^2. The method consists in taking a triangle and in it; the greater vertex is replaced by another with a smaller value. For this purpose four operations can be done on the triangle, namely, reflection, expansion, contraction and reduction. The process is repeated over and over until convergence is reached at a point considered as minimum. This laboratory can be a valuable tool for the numerical method subject present in most of technical and scientific careers.

Keywords:

Nelder-Mead method, Virtual laboratory, minimization.