COMPSCI H250: Honors Section for Introduction to Computation

David Mix Barrington

Fall 2025

This is the home page for COMPSCI H250. COMPSCI H250 is the honors section for the undergraduate core course in discrete mathematics and will focus on the book Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.

Instructor Contact Info: David Mix Barrington, 210 Computer Science Building, 545-4329, office hours for Fall 2025: Mon 3-4, Thu 2-3, Fri 12-1, all in room W210. Zoom number 459 532 6175.

The best way to contact Dave is by email.

This course is open to students who have taken or are currently taking COMPSCI 250, with preference given to students in the Commonwealth Honors College. Thus students will be expected to have the calculus and programming background required for COMPSCI 250.

The course meets for one seminar session each week, on Fridays 4:00-5:00 pm, in room W140 of the CS building.

The Hofstadter book (any edition) is the required text and the source of reading assignments and some exercises.

Grading for the course will be based on class participation, some exercises from the book to be handed in, and a final project.

I have set up a Canvas page, with its main purpose for you to hand in writing assignments.

General Plan (subject to change):

• Session 1, 5 September: Introductions, overview of the book, completeness and consistency, the MU-puzzle.

• Session 2, 12 September: MU-Puzzle solution, prime and composite numbers. Read Prologue, Chapter I (with following dialogues) before class.

• Session 3, 19 September: Figure and ground, number sequences. Read Chapters II and III with following dialogues, explain the number sequence on page 73.

• Session 4, 26 September: Geometry and Recursion. Read Chapters IV, V and following dialogues, look at M and F functions on age 137.

• Session 5, 3 October: Satisfiability, a bit of Fibonacci numbers. Read VI, VII and following dialogues, review Propositional Calculus.

• Session 6, 10 October: Read VIII and the Mu Offering (through page 245). Write up answers to the exercises in the book on pages 212-213 and 215. (The "power of 10" one is solved in section 3.7 of the CS 250 textbook -- I'm not asking you to do it here.)

• Session 7, 17 October: Read IX and the Prelude... Ant Fugue (through page 284 plus 310-336.

• Session 8, 24 October: Read Chapter X. Give me a proposal for your end-of-term project (a few sentences).

• Session 9, 31 October: Reading assignment is Chapter XIII, skipping Chapters XI and XII, except for the "English French German Suite" (which is between after XI and XII). Also do the first three exercises on page 415, and the first ten on page 416. We'll talk about XIII in class.

• Session 10, 7 November: NO CLASS (Kevin Murphy and I are in a show, HMS Pinafore by Gilbert and Sullivan that evening. You could see it either then or on 6, 8, or 9 November -- see the Valley Light Opera website.

• Session 11, 14 November: The reading assignment is Air on G's String and Chapter XIV. There were going to be some (TBA) Exercises from Chapter XIII and XIV that will be due. In fact, I'm afraid I delayed long enough that it's too late to make them an assignment. However, what I want to talk about this coming Friday is pages 438-445. The assignment would have been the exercises at the end of page 442 and the beginning of page 443. If you get a chance to look at those, please do, as it should enhance our discussion. (Update -- we completed the argument on pages 438-448, and I think we can fairly say that we went through a complete proof of Godel's Theorem.)

• Session 12, 21 November: General discussion of other topics in GEB suggested by students in Assignment 8.

• No class 28 November (Thanksgiving break)

• Session 13, 5 December: Class Presentations. The plan is to start at 4:00 and go as long as we need, hopefully finishing by 6:00-6:30. I will order in some pizza.

Last modified 14 November 2025