Computer Science 2800: Discrete Structures
Spring, 2009

Prof. Joe Halpern

• course policies and general information
• staff (including office hours)
• Lecture notes
• Homework assignments

Breaking news

• 5/15/09: Don't forget: the final is in Olin 155. Good luck!
• 5/4/09: More news:
  • Review sessions are set for Tuesday, May 12, 7-8:30 in Hollister 110 (with Venkat) and Wednesday, May 13, 4:45 - 6:15 in Phillips 219 (with Joseph).
  • Office hours go on as usual, with the following two exceptions:
    • Jeff Pankewicz's office hours tonight (May 5) are cancelled
    • Pakawat's office hours on Thursday, May 14 are moved to 5-6 (they were suppsoed to be 3-4).
    There may be a few other minor changes; stay tuned.
  • You can pick up the last homework (and previous homeworks) in the homework room: Upson 360. It's open 10-12 and 2-4 every day. (If for some reason no one is there during those hours, go to the main computer science office on the fourth floor; they may be able to let you in. They're trying to get students to staff it.)
• 5/1/09:
  • Course evaulations: Now that the course is over, let met encourage you all to fill in the reviews. The feedback really is valuable (I've modified how I teach parts of the course in response to feedback). If you really have comments on things that could be done to improve the course, it would be great if you would be willing to meet with me and tell me about it. (I promise it won't hurt your grade! I'm tough: I can take criticism.) But putting it into a review is better than nothing.
  • I posted a copy of the final I gave in 2004 here; the solutions are here. We did not cover exactly the same material that year. In (My excuse is that I co-taught the course that year and the person I taught with wrote about half the questions -- I'll leave it to you to which half.) In particular, we didn't do graph theory and finite state automata, so there were no questions on those topics on the exam (and there will be questions on those topics this year). On the other hand, we did more on probability then than we did this year. Don't worry about question 9(c),(d),(h),(i),(j). We didn't cover that material this year.
  • I've now posted all the solutions to homework problems. I would *strongly* encourage you to look these over while you're studying for the final (even if you got hthe homework right). I tried to comment on common errors in the solutions).
  • There should be review sessions on both Tuesday, 5/12, and Wednesday, 5/13, probably at 4:45. Stay tuned ...
• 4/19: Jeff Pankewicz's office hours this week (4/21) are cancelled, due to a prelim.
• 3/3/09: Don't forget: the prelim is tonight 7:30-9 in Hollister B14.
• 2/22/09: Here is the prelim I gave in 2004 and its solution. Note that the coverage was a bit different in 2004. Don't worry about the lcm material in question 8 (we didn't cover it this year). We covered more number theory this year, and did less in Chapter 0. Also, I will have done a bit more combinatorics (Chapter 4) than I did before the prelim in 2004.
• 2/7/09: The newsgroup for the class has been switched to cornell.cs.cs2800. We now have coverage for the newsgroup, so I encourage you to use it.
• We are now meeting in Kimball B11 (not Phillips 203, thanks goodness!)