This is the home page for COMPSCI 250. COMPSCI 250 is the undergraduate core course in discrete mathematics and will deal with logic, elementary number theory, proof by induction, recursion on trees, search algorithms, finite state machines, and a bit of computability.
Instructor Contact Info:
David Mix Barrington, 210 Computer Science Building, 545-4329, private zoom number 459 532 6175, office hours for Fall 2023: TBA
Ghazaleh Parvini, A231 LGRC, office hours for Fall 2023: TBA
The best way to contact either Dave or Ghazaleh is by email. Dave will usually eventually answer email at barring@umass.edu, but not as quickly.
TA and UCA Contact Info:
This course is primarily intended for undergraduates in computer science and related majors such as informatics, mathematics or computer engineering. CICS 160 (using data structures) and MATH 132 (Calculus II) are prerequisites and are pretty strictly enforced.
The four-credit course meets for three lecture meetings a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Ghazaleh will lecture 10:10-11:00 in Morrill II 131 and Dave will lecture 12:20-1:10, in ELAB II 119 -- the lectures will be similar and will follow the textbook pretty closely. Both lecture sections of the course will have the same assignments, exams, and grade scale.
The schedule below indicates which lectures and discussions happen which days, which sections of the book to which they refer, and when the homework assignments are due.
There is one discussion meeting per week for each of the nine sections, at various times on Fridays before lecture as indicated on SPIRE. (Each discussion section includes students from both lecture sections.) Each discussion will have a written assignment which you will carry out in groups. Discussion attendance is required, so that missing a discussion will incur a grade penalty. The TA's and instructors will cover the sections in various combinations, so they will be as interchangeable as we can make them.
The textbook is the current draft of Dave's in-progress book, A Mathematical Foundation for Computer Science. This is available as an e-book from Kendall Hunt Publishing (last year for $60, probably a bit more this year). It has an "assessment package" where you will need the current version of the book to answer quiz questions. The book and package can be obtained from the eCampus site or directly from Kendall Hunt.
The course is using the Moodle course management system and the Piazza system for student discussion. We will also use a free system called ClassQuestion, which replaces the iClicker system we used earlier. They will be used in grading only for classroom attendance. Basic information about the course will be on this site, and specifics of the course will be off of the Moodle main page once it is established.
Announcements (25 August 2023):
Last modified 31 August 2023