CMPSCI 250: Introduction to Computation

David Mix Barrington

Spring, 2015

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 TBA. I generally answer my email fairly reliably.

TA Contact Info:

Cibele Friere, cibelemf@cs.umass.edu, office hours Tue 11:30-12:30,
Kevin Spiteri, kspiteri@cs.umass.edu, office hours Thu 1-2,
Shikang Xu, sxu@ecs.umass.edu, office hours Wed 4-5,
TA office hours are held in LGRT 220.

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 three lecture meetings a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 1:25-2:30, in Goessmann 20.

There is one discussion meeting per week for each of the four sections, at various times on Friday 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 the current draft of my in-progress book, Discrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science. This will be available at Collective Copies in Amherst Center, sometime around the start of term. Prior versions of the textbook that were intended for CMPSCI 250 may be used -- the most recent versions of the book differ only by the correction of some minor errors.

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 (3 August 2015):

(3 August) I have now posted the final exam and its solution.

(14 April) The solutions to the second midterm are now available. Sorry it took me a while to get to this. I will bring the uncollected exam papers to lecture tomorrow.

(12 April) The second midterm is graded, and papers were returned last Friday. The exam text is posted, and solutions will follow soon, possibly tonight. The scale was A = 90, B = 76, C = 62, D = 48, F = 34. If R is the raw score, the normalized score (which are now on Moodle) is given by (R - 34) * (400/56), or 0 if that expression is negative. The ranges for letter grades, with the number of exams in each range, are as follows:

A+ (93-108): 20
A (88-92): 11
A- (83-87): 17
B+ (79-82): 20
B (74-78): 20
B- (69-73): 20
C+ (65-68): 14
C (60-64): 9
C- (55-59): 16
D+ (51-54): 6
D (46-50): 6
F (30-45): 7

(4 March) The exams are now all graded and the normalized scores will be put on Moodle soon. I will give back the papers at lecture this afternoon.

The scale is A (400) = 93, B (300) = 79, C (200) = 65, D (100) = 51, and F (0) = 37. If R is the raw score, the normalized score is (R - 37) * (400/56), or 0 if that expression is negative. The ranges for letter grades, with the number of exams in each range, are as follows:

A+ (96-108): 36
A (91-95): 17
A- (86-90): 12
B+ (82-85): 19
B (77-81): 17
B- (72-76): 15
C+ (68-71): 6
C (63-67): 13
C- (58-62): 19
D+ (54-57): 5
D (49-53): 5
F (30-48): 7

Students with C- exams should realize that it is quite possible to continue getting C- exams and get a C or better overall in the course, since other components will likely bring the average up. Students with D or F exams may want to consider dropping the course but if so should do so quickly, since the deadline is tomorrow (Thursday).

(2 March) The first midterm and its solution have been posted. Graded exams will probably be returned on Wednesday.

(10 February) The syllabus has been updated to account for the two snow days. I've also put the Spring 2014 lectures notes up on the site for that course. These lectures are similar to the ones for this semester.

(14 January) The syllabus and requirements and grading page are now available. If you are not registered for the course and want to be, the only way to be considered is to file an override request online with the CMPSCI office. If you haven't done this already, you may well be out of luck. I don't make the final decisions on admission to the class, but I can answer email questions about the process. Don't be mislead by the "available seats" on SPIRE -- the number of override requests we already have exceeds the number of those.

(12 January) I am putting up only a preliminary version of the course website today. The full version of last spring's website is available here and has exams with solutions and a full syllabus. It will soon have PDF lecture notes from last semester's course as well. This offering of CMPSCI 250 will be very similar to that one.

Last modified 14 December 2015