CMPSCI 250: Introduction to Computation

David Mix Barrington

Spring 2017

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 11-12, Thu 2-3, Fri 2:30-3:30.

I generally answer my email fairly reliably.

TA Contact Info:

TA's Stefan Dernbach (dernbach@cs.umass.edu), Ariel Reches (areches@cs.umass.edu), and Shikang Xu (shikang.umass.edu).
Graders Dominic Defuria (ddefuria@umass.edu), William Toohey (wtoohey@umass.edu).

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 ELAB II 119.

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.

Announcements (20 July 2017):

(20 Jul) I have finally posted the text and solutions for the final exam. Aggregate results for the exam and course will follow soon.

(18 Apr) The text and solutions for the second midterm are now available.

(17 Apr) I'm working on texts and solutions for the second midterm and may have them up soon. In the meantime here are the stats on the exam I already emailed to students in the course. The scale was A = 93 and C = 60. The high was 109, the median 74, and the low 33. Here are the number of students falling within each grade range:

A+ (96-109): 34
A (91-95): 9
A- (85-90): 15
B+ (80-84): 18
B (74-79): 23
B- (69-73): 27
C+ (63-68): 25
C (58-62): 18
C- (52-57): 12
D+ (47-51): 5
D (41-46): 5
F (33-40): 2

(19 Mar) The first midterm and its solution are now posted. The exams have been returned, and grades placed on Moodle. The high scores were three perfect 110's, the low was 42, and the median was 81. There were 29 A+ papers (98+), 15 A (93-97), 25 A- (88-92), 26 B+ (83-87), 22 B (78-82), 34 B- (73-77), 21 C+ (68-72), 9 C (63-67), 8 C- (58-62), 2 D+ (53-57), 5 D (48-52), and 2 F (42-47).

(13 Jan) The goals and requirements pages are up.

(12 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 20 July 2017