CMPSCI 250: Introduction to Computation

David Mix Barrington

Spring, 2013

This is the home page for CMPSCI 250. CMPSCI 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 CMPSCI building, 545-4329, office hours Monday 11-12, Tuesday 11-12, Wednesday 2:30-3:30, Thursday 3-4. I generally answer my email fairly reliably.

TA Contact Info: Melissa Frechette (mfrechet@cs.umass.edu), office hours Monday 4:30-5:30, Cibele Friere (cibelemf@cs.umass.edu), office hours Wednesday 4-5, Girish Paladugu (gpaladugu@ecs.umass.edu), office hours Tuesday 4-5. TA office hours are in LGRT 220.

There is a supplemental instructor for the course at the Learning Resource Center in DuBois Library. His name is Tung Pham and his sessions are Tuesday 4-5:15 and Thursday 8:30-9:45 (am) in DuBois 1349.

The course is primarily intended for undergraduates in computer science and related majors such as mathematics or computer engineering. CMPSCI 187 (programming with data structures) and MATH 132 (Calculus II) are corequisites and in fact most students in the course have already taken both.

The course meets for two lecture meetings a week, Tuesday and Thursday 9:30-10:45, in Goessman 20.

There is one discussion meeting per week for each of the four sections, at various times on Monday as indicated on SPIRE. Most discussions 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 I will cover the sections in various combinations, so they should be as interchangeable as we can make them.

The textbook is Rosen's Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications. The seventh edition is recommended but the sixth is acceptable. For the last section of the course we will use one chapter of my draft textbook, Discrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science. I will figure out what to do about distributing this.

The course is using the iClicker system, and the Moodle course management system. Basic information about the course will be on this site, and specifics of the course will be off of the Moodle main page here.

Announcements (21 May 2013):

Last modified 8 December 2013