cs501, Spring 2002 Course Introduction

This course, Discrete Structures, is taught by the WPI Department of Computer Science. In this course the following topics from dicrete mathematics relevant to computer science are studied: sets, logic and proofs, Boolean algebras and combinatorial circuits, algorithms, relations, posets, recurrence relations, graphs, digraphs, trees.

This material is part of the theoretical foundations of computer science and it is intended only for students with a limited formal computer science background. The course does not provide credit toward a computer science graduate degree.

Expected Background

This course expectes that you understand basic mathematics at least through calculus and have some experience with recursive programming. In addition, you will be expected to have access to and be able to use a symbolic computation system, like Maple, Mathematica, ScratchPad, Macsyma etc. The school has a very wide ranging license for Maple. You can use it on some central machines (of the CCC and math), some CS machines, and also get a copy for your own machine, for most platforms. The reason: while some of the material we cover requires you to learn techniques of calculating, and then you should do the homework by hand, when the going gets heavy, and surely when we use these techniques, there is no need to be stubborn about it -- just as you do simple numerical calculations on back of an envelope, and for anything half serious use a calculator or computer.

Course Meetings:

The course meets every week

WPI MetroWest Campus, Tuesday, 6:00--8:50pm Room 207.