Course Overview
This is one of two offerings of Discrete Mathematics this semester, a course designed to provide the mathematical tools needed for later CS courses. This version is shared by Elizabeth Orrico and Luther Tychonievich (sections 002 through 008).
Connecting to the course is managed through Collab:
Collab pulls participant information once each day from SIS. If you add the course, you may need to wait up to 24 hours before you have Collab access.
If you are in Kevin Sullivan’s section (001), please see http://provablesystems.com/ instead.
Eligibility
You should take this course if and only if
- You have credit (or passed the placement test) for at least one of CS 1110, CS 1111, CS 1112, CS 1113, or CS 1120
Learning Outcomes
At the conclusion of this course, a successful student will be able to
- Communicate using first-order logic to unambiguously specify claims, including
- converting between English and logic
- proper use of alternating quantifiers
- Prove theorems and write prose proofs by hand, utilizing the following proof techniques
- direct proof
- proof by contradiction
- proof by cases
- induction
- Converse in the language of sets, including proper use of
- set operators (notation and meaning)
- set-builder notation
- cardinality, both finite and infinite (but not classes of infinity)
- Categorize functions as invertable, 1-to-1, and onto
- Identify relations with the reflexive, transitive, and associative properties, and identify equivalence relations in particular
- Understand and use
- summation notation
- counting rules
- prime factorization
- logarithms
Writeups
From time to time I create reference pages intended to supplement the textbooks (MCS and ∀x, the latter also having a solution book); I have no obvious place to list those supplements so I’m listing them here. They are:
- On Proofs, including four different uses of the word
proof
- Symbols we’ll use, which is made available during in-class quizzes
- Six meanings of
everyone can fit in a bus
, an introduction to quantifiers and the purpose of jargon
- Operator precedence and how it helps convert between English and logic
- Axioms, being useful tools out of which we build proofs
- Guide to Direct Proof
- English to Quantifiers
- Sets primer
- induction addenda
- Proof Techniques, a list of techniques with tips on proof writing
- Logical Reduction
- MCS 4 addenda
- Glossary of logical terms
- Example proofs, including De Morgan’s laws, bubble sort, Cantor diagonalization, open sets, irrationality of various numbers
- All in-class practice and quiz questions from previous semesters