Office Hours

TF: Arsenii Mustafin
When (where): M 9:30-11:00 am (PSY B53F), F 9:30-11:00am (PHO 201)

TF: Tolik Zinovyev
When (where): W 17:35 – 18:35 ( EMA302 ),  F 13:30 – 15:30 (PSY B33)

TF: Hassan Saadi 
When: T 17:15 – 18:15, R 17:15 – 19:15
Where: EMA302

 

Discussion Labs

Labs will be an invaluable part of the course involving interactive problem-solving sessions, tips on homework questions, and supplemental material not covered in lecture. Attendance is mandatory and will be taken.

Homework Assignments

Assignments and all other handouts can be found on our Piazza page, under the Resources tab.

Announcements

1. First day of class is Tuesday, September 3rd. See you all there!

Prerequisites

Basic (high school level) calculus and algebra.

Academic Conduct

Academic standards and the code of academic conduct are taken very seriously by our university, by the College of Arts and Sciences, and by the Department of Computer Science. Course participants must adhere to the CAS Academic Conduct Code – please take the time to review this document if you are unfamiliar with its contents.

Collaboration Policy

The collaboration policy for this class is as follows. You are encouraged to collaborate with one another in studying the textbook and lecture material. As long as it satisfies the following conditions, collaboration on the homework assignments is permitted and will not reduce your grade:

• Before discussing each homework problem with anyone else, you must give it an honest half-hour of serious thought.
• You may discuss ideas and approaches with other students in the class, but not share any written solutions. In other words, the writeups you submit must be entirely your own work. You must also acknowledge clearly in the appropriate portion of your solutions (e.g., at the top of your write-ups) people with whom you discussed ideas for that portion.
• You may get help from TFs and undergrad assistants for the class for specific problems. Don’t expect them to do it for you, however.
• You may not work with people outside this class (but come and talk to us if you have a tutor), seek online solutions, get someone else to do it for you, etc.
• You are not permitted to collaborate on exams.

The last point is particularly important: if you don’t make an honest effort on the homework but always get ideas from others, your exam scores (accounting for the majority of your grade) will reflect it.

Grading

The course grade will break down as follows:

1. Problem sets: 25%
2. Two midterms: 40% (20%+20%)
3. Final exam: 30%
4. Lab attendance and participation in {lab, lecture, Piazza}: 5%

Incompletes for this class will not be granted.

Exams: There will be two in-class midterms held during the middle of the semester, tentatively Thursday, October 10  and Thursday, November 11. The final will take place at the end of the class, and will be held during the normal two-hour final exam slot.  Please make your end-of-semester travel plans accordingly!

Homework Assignments, Submission, and Late Policy: Assignments will typically be due Fridays at 5PM sharp.  We will be using gradescope. 
To compute your homework grade, we will automatically drop the one lowest score from the assignments, so one bad homework grade is not the end of the world. However, we strongly recommend putting forth your best effort on all assignments, as they provide the best preparation for the exams. As you likely already know, assignments requiring substantial creativity can take more time than you expect, so plan to finish a day early.

Regrading Procedure: If, after reviewing the posted solutions, you still believe a portion of your homework was graded in error, you may request a regrade.  This is done via gradescope. Note that when we regrade a problem, your score may go up or down.

Attendance: It is expected that you will attend lecture and the laboratory section for this course. Attendance will be taken in labs. On occasion, some material covered in lecture and lab will not be covered by our textbook. We ask that you please arrive in class on time, since it is disruptive to have students flowing in throughout the class period. Moreover, when students are at a borderline between grades, I will factor in attendance before making a final determination.

Textbook

Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications, Kenneth H. Rosen, 8th Edition.

Communications

We will be using Piazza for class discussion. The system is highly catered to getting you answers to your questions fast and efficiently from classmates, the TF, and the instructors. Please do not email questions to the teaching staff – post your questions on Piazza instead. We also encourage you to post answers to student questions there (but obviously, not answers to problems on the problem sets!). Our class page is located at: https://piazza.com/bu/fall2019/cs131/home. Please go there to sign up today. We will also use Piazza to post announcements and all handouts, including homework assignments and solutions.

Homeworks

• HW1
• HW2
• HW3
• HW4
• HW5
• HW6
• HW7
• HW8
• HW9
• HW10

Slides

Schedule

Remark: Homework due date is on Fridays 5pm, i.e., the next day after Thursday lecture.

	Lecture	Topic	Readings from	Homework Due Dates
	9/3 (T)	Introduction to propositional logic	Chapter 1
	9/5 (R)	Propositional logic	Chapter 1
	9/10 (T)	Predicate logic	Chapter 1
	9/12 (R)	Predicate logic (cont.)	Chapter 1	HW 1
	9/17 (T)	Rules of inference and Proofs (cont.)	Chapters 1,2
	9/19 (R)	Proofs (cont.)	Chapter 1	HW 2
	9/24 (T)	Proofs (cont.)	Chapter 1
	9/26 (R)	Sets	Chapter 2	HW 3
	10/1 (T)	Sets (cont.), sequences	Chapter 2
	10/3 (R)	Induction	Chapter 5	HW 4
	10/8 (T)	Induction	Chapter 5
	10/10 (R)	Midterm 1, covers lectures up to 10/3
	10/15 (T)	No class (Columbus day)
	10/17 (R)	Problem solving session		HW 5
	10/22  (T)	Recurrences, Big-O,Θ,Ω notation	Chapters 3.2. 8.3.2, 3.1
	10/24 (R)	Recursive algorithms	Chapter 3,5,8	HW 6
	10/29 (T)	Recursive algorithms, Integer representation	Chapter 3,5,8, 4.2.2
	10/31 (R)	Number theory	Chapter 4	HW 7
	11/5 (T)	Number theory	Chapter 4
	11/7 (R)	Midterm 2 (covers all lectures up to 10/31)
	11/12 (T)	Number theory	Chapter 4
	11/14 (R)	Number theory	Chapter 4	HW 8
	11/19 (T)	Counting	Chapters 6,8
	11/21 (R)	Counting	Chapters 6	HW 9
	11/26 (T)	Counting and intro to graphs	Chapters 6, 10
	11/28 (R)	No Class (Happy Thanksgiving!)
	12/3 (T)	Graphs and trees	Chapters 10,11
	12/5 (R)	Graphs and trees	Chapters 10,11	HW 10
	12/10 (T)	Counting and Graphs	Chapters 6, 10,11