COMPSCI H250: Honors Section for Introduction to Computation

David Mix Barrington

Spring 2023

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 Spring 2023: Mon 2-3, Tu 10-11 (zoom), Th 1-2). 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, probably on Fridays 4:00-5:00 pm, in a room to be decided.

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 will set up a Moodle page, with its main purpose for you to hand in writing assignments.

Plan from Spring 2021 version):

• Session 1, 10 February: Introductions, overview of the book, completeness and consistency, the MU-puzzle.

• Session 2, 17 January: MU-Puzzle solution, prime and composite numbers. Read Prologue, Chapter I (with following dialogues) before class.

• Session 3, 24 February: Figure and ground, number sequences. Read Chapters II and III with following dialogues, explain the number sequence on page 73.

• Session 4, 3 March: Geometry and Recursion. Read Chapters IV, V and following dialogues, look at M and F functions on age 137.

• Session 5, 10 March: Satisfiability, a bit of Fibonacci numbers. Read VI, VII and following dialogues, review Propositional Calculus.

• Session 6, 24 March: 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, 31 March: Read IX and the Prelude... Ant Fugue (through page 284 plus 310-336.

  Session 8, 7 April: Read X. Give me a proposal for your end-of-term project (a few sentences).

  Session 9, 14 April: Reading assignment is Chapter XI plus the "English French German Suite".

Last modified 17 February 2023