Instructors:

• Professor Max Mintz:
  
  
  • Office: CIS Department, 262 GRW
    
    
  • Office Hours: Wednesday 15:00-16:00 @ Room TBA
    
    
  • Phone: 898-7909
    
    
  • E-mail:mintz@central.cis.upenn.edu
    
    
  • Home Page: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mintz/home.html
    
    
• CSE 260 Course Evaluations:
  
  
  • CSE 260 (Fall 1997): http://www.seas.upenn.edu/course-evals/97CCSE260001.HTML
    
    
  • CSE 260 (Fall 1998): http://www.seas.upenn.edu/course-evals/98CCSE260001.HTML
    
    
  • CSE 260 (Fall 1999): http://www.seas.upenn.edu/course-evals/99CCSE260001.HTML
    
    
  • CSE 260 (Fall 2000): http://www.seas.upenn.edu/course-evals/00CCSE260001.HTML
    
    
  • CSE 260 (Fall 2001): http://www.seas.upenn.edu/course-evals/01CCSE260001.HTML
    
    
  • CSE 260 (Fall 2002): http://www.seas.upenn.edu/course-evals/02CCSE260001.HTML
    
    
  • CSE 260 (Fall 2003): http://www.seas.upenn.edu/course-evals/03CCSE260001.HTML
    
    
• Teaching Assistants:
  
  

  Name:	E-Mail:	Office:	Office Hours:
  Kevin Gimpel	kgimpel@seas.upenn.edu	TBA	TBA
  Gayle Laakmann	laakmann@seas.upenn.edu	TBA	TBA
  Katherine Moore	kfm@seas.upenn.edu	TBA	TBA
  Elizabeth Palmer	palmer@seas.upenn.edu	TBA	TBA
  David Thornton	davidjt@seas.upenn.edu	TBA	TBA

Class Schedule:

• Lectures: Tuesday, Thursday 13:30-14:50, Room DRL A5
  
  
• Recitations: Friday 14:00-14:50, Room Heilmeier Hall

Preliminary Examination Schedule:

• Preliminary Examination I: Friday 3 October, 14:00-14:50; Room: Heilmeier Hall
  
  
• Preliminary Examination II: Friday 31 October, 14:00-14:50; Room: Heilmeier Hall
  
  
• Preliminary Examination III: Tuesday 25 November, 13:30-14:20; Room: DRL A5
  
  
• NB: Makeup preliminary examinations will only be given for verified medical reasons. All makeup examinations are oral.

Weekly Quizzes:

• There will be weekly written quizzes lasting 10-15 minutes. The quizzes are usually scheduled on Fridays in those weeks when there is no preliminary examination scheduled. The purpose of the quizzes is to aid students in keeping current on the homework and lecture material. The subject material of the quizzes will be taken from the homework assignments and lectures. The tentative quiz schedule is: September 12, 19, 25 (Thursday, Room DRL A5); October 10, 17, 24; November 7, 14, 21; and December 5. No makeup quizzes will be given.

Examination Policy:

• NB: All preliminary examinations and quizzes are closed-book examinations. No written notes, personal assistants, or calculators are permitted.

Written Assignments Policy:

• Written assignments (problem sets) will be given weekly during lecture and recitation. The problems will vary in difficulty and will be designed to reinforce and augment the material in the lectures and texts.
  
  
  • Assignments include: analytical work, derivations, proofs, algorithms, and computer program implementations.
    
    
• The assignments will be collected and graded. Each assignment must be submitted at the beginning of the class in which it is due. Late submissions will not be accepted. Our goal is to grade all of the homework that is submitted in a timely fashion. However, due to the size of the class, it may become necessary from time to time to limit grading to a selected subset of the assigned problems. For example, if five problems are assigned in a given set, we might select three of the five problems for grading.
  
  
• Problem set solutions will be discussed in the recitation section with additional commentary from time to time in the lectures. Solutions to the homework problems will be distributed in class.
  
  
• You are permitted to discuss the homework problems with other class members with the following limitations. These discussions are to be limited to high-level concepts. You are not permitted to copy or share written work or implementation details. It is understood that the work that you submit may be based on these discussions but has not been either copied directly from another student's paper nor is it, in part or in whole, the product of impermissible collaboration.
  
  
• All written work must be neat, well-organized, and include sufficient explanations in the delineation of the solutions. Messy, poorly organized, or illegible material will be returned ungraded.
  
  
• Each homework set will be graded based on the following grade levels: E (excellent), S (satisfactory), U (unsatisfactory), NC (no credit).

Grading Policy:

• The final course grade will be based entirely on the three preliminary examinations, the comprehensive two-hour final examination, the aggregate quiz scores, and the homework assignments. No exemptions from examinations will be made. The final grade will be based on the following units: (1) the ten quizzes; (2) prelim I; (3) prelim II; (4) prelim III; (5) the final exam, part I; and (6) the final exam, part II. The sum of these six components will constitute 90% of the final course grade. The remaining 10% of the final course grade will be based on the aggregate homework scores.
  
  
• Policy on Grade Scaling: The instructor retains the option to scale the exam grades. Historically, we have: (1) dropped the lowest quiz grade; (2) adjusted the median of a preliminary exam to 75, when the raw median was below 75; (3) adjusted the median of a part of the final exam to 75, when the raw median was below 75; and (4) dropped the lowest of the five scores: Prelim I, Prelim II, Prelim III, Final part I, and Final part II.

Texts:

• In lieu of a required text, Lecture Notes will be distributed in class throughout the semester.

CSE 260-261 Course Topics:

1. Introductions to Algorithms
   
   
2. Number Theory
   
   
3. Set Theory
   
   
4. Relations
   
   
5. Functions
   
   
6. Combinatorics
   
   
7. Probability Theory
   
   
8. Graph Theory
   
   
9. Finite Algebraic Structures
   
   
10. Logic and Formal Systems