CMPSCI 250: Introduction to Computation

David Mix Barrington

Spring 2016

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 for Spring 2016 Tue 1-2, Wed 2:30-3:30, Thu 3-4. I generally answer my email fairly reliably.

TA Contact Info:

• TA's Stefan Dernbach (dernbach@cs.umass.edu) and Shikang Xu (sxu@ecs.umass.edu).
• Graders Ka Wo Fong, Stanley Lok, Michael Radford, and Varun Sharma, emails available on the Moodle main page.

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 Thompson 106.

There is one discussion meeting per week for each of the four sections, at various times on Friday mornings 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 when it is established soon.

• Course Requirements and Grading
• Learning Goals for the Course
• Lecture Slides from Spring 2014
• Exam Directory (with second midterm and solutions)
• Syllabus and Schedule

Announcements (16 May 2016):

• (16 May And here is the distribution of final grades in the course, for the 166 non-W finishers (four of whom chose not to take the final exam):
  • A (with course citation): 13
  • A (without citation): 17
  • A-: 22
  • B+: 29
  • B: 28
  • B-: 18
  • C+: 15
  • C: 7
  • C-: 5
  • D+: 6
  • D: 4
  • F: 2

  Students getting less than C will be withdrawn from any fall CS courses that require CS 250 as a prerequisite. Students awarded course citations (a final score of 418 or more on the Moodle site) will get their email to that effect later in the summer.

  Thanks to all for an enjoyable course!

• (14 May) The final exam and its solutions are now posted. The scale was as announced on the exam paper, with A = 110 and C = 75. The high score was 128, the median was 95, and there were only eleven of the 162 papers with scores below 60. Final grades are now posted on Moodle. More detail on the final exam:
  • A+ (113-128): 26
  • A (108-112): 13
  • A- (102-107): 12
  • B+ (96-101): 28
  • B (90-95): 21
  • B- (84-89): 13
  • C+ (78-83): 18
  • C (73-77): 5
  • C- (67-72): 4
  • D+ (61-66): 10
  • D (55-60): 3
  • F (11-54): 9

  I will post similar statistics for the final course grades soon.

• (10 Apr) I have posted text and solutions for the second midterm. The scale was A = 93, B = 79.5, C = 66, D = 52.5, F = 39. The high was 107, the median 80, and the low 29. There were 14 A+ (96-107), 20 A (91-95), 19 B+ (87-90), 28 B (78-81), 17 B- (73-77), 23 C+ (69-72), 13 C (64-68), 5 C- (60-63), 5 D+ (55-59), 2 D (51-54), and 4 F (29-50).

• (6 Mar) I have posted text and solutions for the first midterm today. The scale was A = 88, B = 73, C = 58, D = 43, F = 28. The high was 107, the median 67, and the low 32. Further information is available on the Moodle page.

• (7 Jan) 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. The link above is to the lecture slides from the Spring 2014 offering of this course -- our lectures this term will be similar and slides from this term will be posted on Moodle. This offering of CMPSCI 250 will be very similar to my recent ones.

Last modified 16 May 2016