COMPSCI 575 and MATH 513: Fall 2020

Syllabus and Course Schedule

Prof. David Mix Barrington

Reading assignments are from Bona: Enumerative and Analytic Combinatorics

Lecture material will be asynchronous and recorded. The material for a given week should be viewed before that week's discussion section meeting. The length of individual lectures will vary but there will be 90-120 minutes of lecture content per week.

There will be three discussion meetings each week, with each student expected to attend one. Two will be during the scheduled "lecture" period on SPIRE, Monday and Wednesay 4:00-5:15 p.m., and the third will be scheduled sometime in the morning, Amherst time.

There will be a midterm during Week 6, and a final exam scheduled by the university during the final exam period.

Week 1 (24 Aug): Principles of Combinatorics (Bona 1.1, 1.2, 1.3)

Week 2 (31 Aug): Principles of Combinatorics (Bona 1.4, 1.5)

Week 3 (7 Sept): Counting Trees and Forests (Bona 5.1)

Week 4 (14 Sept): Graphs -- Definitions and Problems (not in book)

Week 5 (21 Sept): Graphs -- NP-Complete Problems, Ramsey Theory (not in book)

Week 6 (28 Sept): Midterm Exam

Week 7 (5 Oct): Multisets and Partitions (Bona 2.1, 2.2, 2.3)

Week 8 (12 Oct): Inclusion-Exclusion, the Twelvefold Way (2.4, 2.5)

Week 9 (19 Oct): Generating Functions (Bona 3)

Week 10 (26 Oct): Exponential Generating Functions (Bona 3)

Week 11 (2 Nov): More on Generating Functions and Counting Forests
(Bona 3, 5)

Week 12 (9 Nov): Conway Theory -- general games, non-partisan games
(not in book)

Week 13 (16 Nov): Conway Theory -- partisan games, surreal numbers
(not in book)


Last modified 18 August 2020