You definitely can. I only ever touched Matlab in a course on Signal Theory (wavelets, Radon transform, Fourier...) All other courses involving anything needing solving 'somehing, were programmed from the ground up in C (off the top of my head this included Numerical Methods, Numerical Analysis, Dynamical Systems). In more algebra focused classes we used gp/pari or Mathematica.
Call me silly, but implementing Numerical Methods/Analysis from the ground up in C sounds like something that would put me in a fetal position in a dark corner somewhere. Why would anyone do that to their students?
Did they also make you implement operating systems in assembler?
Well at Carnegie Mellon they did. That's why I wanna know how some punk got his Caltech paper stamped without even learning C.
He did seem sad that SpaceX wouldn't touch him. Apparently you need more than friends at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an ability to talk endlessly about Haskell to send shit to Mars. So that's good news at least.
I'm a mathematician, not CompSci (but I taught CS students and they had to also implement some things in C on their second semester.) So, no operating systems. Tough stuff was taken for granted when I was in the University.
There seems to be two schools of thought when it comes to teaching numerics. You either teach how to effectively implement the algorithms or you teach how to effectively select and apply the algorithms. It seems to be tied to if the computational science department comes out of the Computer or Math department.
I'm personally of the opinion that knowing how to select and apply the right algorithm is far more important to learn for undergraduates. Implementing numerical algorithms correctly and efficiently is serious high level PhD territory, and if you're not going to learn how to do it right you're much better off not doing it at all and leaving it to the experts.
