dbogatov / BU-CS-131-topic-list

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CS 131 Spring 2018 - List of topics

See lecture recordings here. Warning: they are low-resolution and not great audio quality, so they do not substitute for coming to lecture, but they can be helpful is you must miss a class.

• Jan 23

  • Welcome to CS 131
  • Propositional logic
    • Propositions and logical equivalence
    • Evaluating compound propositions
    • Conditional statements
    • Logical equivalence
    • Laws of propositional logic

• Jan 25

  • Boolean algebra
    • Intro
    • Boolean functions
    • CNF / DNF

• Jan 30

  • Boolean algebra
    • Functional completeness
    • Boolean satisfiability

• Feb 1

  • Predicates and first order logic
    • Predicates and quantifiers
    • Quantified statements

• Feb 6

  • Predicates and first order logic
    • Nested quantifiers (two chapters)
    • Rules of inference with quantifiers

• Feb 8

  • Sets
    • Sets and subsets
    • Sets of sets
    • Union and intersection
    • More set operations
    • Set identities
    • Cartesian products
    • Partitions

• Feb 13

  • See lecture notes
  • Functions (whole zyBooks chapter)

• Feb 15

  • Relations (whole zyBooks chapter)

• Feb 20

  • Monday schedule

• Feb 22

  • Proofs (whole zyBooks chapter)

• Feb 27

  • More on proofs
    • More on proof by cases
    • Euclid algoritm
      • GCD
      • Theorem about GCD (why Euclidian algorithm return GCD) and its proof
      • Theorem: GCD of two numbers over their GCD is 1 (and its proof)

• Mar 1

  • Writing GCD formal defintion in a form of conjunction of three statememnts
  • Theorem: any rational number can be written as x over y s.t. GCD(x,y)=1 (and its proof)
  • Applying GCD to rational numbers (hint: multiply by denominators)
  • Proof that square root of 2 is irrational
  • Theorem: any integer greater than 1 is divisible a prime (and its proof)
  • Theorem: there are infinitely many primes (and its proof)

• Mar 20

  • Halting problem
    • See lecture notes

• Mar 27

  • Geometric series
  • Inductive proofs that are not sums
  • Graphs (some basic definitions)
  • "All horses are the same color"

• Mar 29

  • Sum of infinite series (r < 1)
  • False proofs of horses color
  • Fiboncci sequence
  • Analusis of Euclid's algorithm (see notes)

• April 3

  • Loop invariants
    • Find minimum algorithm
    • Euclids algorithm
  • Pre / post conditions as ways to reason about program correctness

• April 5

  • Structural induction
    • General (non-binary) trees
    • Boolean formulas
  • Proof via structural induction
    • In any tree the number of edges is one smaller than the number of nodes
    • In any formula number of opening and closing patterns matches
  • Two recursive algorithms

• April 17 / 19

  • Binomial coefficients
  • Relation between inclusion / exclusion and identity
  • Binomial distribution

• April 20

  • Binomial coefficients
  • Pascal's triangle
  • Binomial recurrence with code
  • Probability basics: sample spaces, outcomes, events, etc

• April 25

  • Bernoulli trials and binomial distribution
  • Visualization
  • Not in the book
    • 95% of the binomial distribution lies within $\sqrt{n}$ of the average
    • 99.7% of the binomial distribution lies within $1.5 \sqrt{n}$ of the average.
    • Good visualizers:
      • this
      • this

• Thu Apr 27:

  • Not in the book
    • If you try to estimate the bias of a coin (for example, in public polling or in Monte Carlo simulation) by doing $n$ independent samples, your answer will very likely be within about $\frac{1}{\sqrt{n}}$ of the correct answer. So need $n = 400$ samples to get to within 5%, $n = 1112$ to get within 3%, $n = 10000$ to get within 1%.
  • Conditional probability and independence
  • Random variables and expectations