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 210. 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 140 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 XI plus the "English French German Suite".

• Session 10, 7 November:

• Session 11, 14 November:

• Session 12, 21 November:

• No class 28 November (Thanksgiving break)

• Session 13, 5 December: Class Presentations

Last modified 6 September 2025