S Y L LA B U S

Spring Semester, 2011

MTH 220, Section 50
Introduction to Discrete Mathematics
4:00 p.m. – 5:50 p.m., Monday and Wednesday
RW-312

Text: Discrete Mathematics, Lecture Notes by L. Lovász and K. Vesztergombi, available as a 911 KB
PDF file at the class site on Blackboard. It is also available as a PostScript (.ps) file at
<http://www.cs.elte.hu/~lovasz/notes.html>.

Instructor: Prof. Brian M. Scott, RT-1514. My campus phone number is 687-4698, but I prefer e-
mail at <bm.brian@gmail.com> (or <b.scott@csuohio.edu>); I normally check my e-mail several times
a day, especially when I’m not on campus. If you send me e-mail, please put the course number
(MTH 220) somewhere in the Subject line.

Office Hours: 11:00 – 12:00 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and 2:45 – 3:45 on Mondays and
Wednesdays. I’ll be in the Math Learning Centre, MC-471, not my office, unless I let you know
otherwise. I will also generally be available after our class. My other classes meet from 12:15 to 1:20
and 1:30 to 2:35 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; I'll be happy to answer questions at any other
time that you may happen to find me, unless I absolutely need to get something else done right away.

Schedule: The holidays this term are President’s Day (21 February) and Spring Recess (13 – 20
March). The last day to drop the class without having it appear on your transcript is Friday, 28 January;
the last day to drop it with a grade of W is Friday, 1 April. The last day of classes is Friday, 6 May.
The final exam is at 4:00 p.m. on Monday, 9 May, in our regular classroom.

Topics Covered: See the accompanying course outline. I may adjust the order of topics a bit or even a
omit some depending on how the course goes. From time to time I will cover some material that is
not in the text.

Attendance: I do not take attendance, but you are responsible for all material covered, whether or not
it is in the text.

Graded Material: We’ll have two midterms and a final. The first midterm will follow the material
listed in the course outline up through Section 3.3 in the text; the second will follow the material on
integers, divisors, and primes. I can’t predict the exact dates of the midterms, but I will try to give (at
least) a week’s warning before each of them. The final exam is comprehensive. The second midterm is
in principle also comprehensive, but in practice it will focus heavily on the material covered since the
previous exam, and I may not have room for any review questions. I do not give practice exams; I
think that they are a crutch, and that in the long run you are better off learning to pick out the important
material on your own. Each midterm will count for about 20% of your grade; the final will count for
about 30%. I will also assign and collect homework. If I have time, I’ll grade all of it; if not, I’ll
choose some of the assigned problems at random and grade them. The homework will count for about
30% of your grade.

I expect all written work to be organized comprehensibly and to make your reasoning clear; in
general I’m at least as much interested in the reasoning as in the final answer.
Make-up Exams: Never having found a way to make them fair, I don't give make-up exams. If you
know ahead of time that you'll have to miss an exam for a good reason, let me know, and we’ll try to
work something out. If you unexpectedly miss an exam for a good reason, I’ll pro-rate your score on
the final exam to cover the missing score. (In other words, it will be as if you had done exactly as well
on the missed exam as you do on the final.)

A Note on the Nature of the Course: It’s likely that almost all of the math courses that most of you
have taken to date have been primarily computational: you’ve learned to use a variety of computational
tools (e.g., derivatives) to solve certain types of problems. Some of this course is also computational,
but some is more theoretical, and you may find that it takes a little while to get the hang of writing up
answers that are explanations (proofs) rather than computations and results of computations. This is
something that we’ll work on as we go along; I don’t expect instant perfection!

Grading Philosophy: Most of you are probably used to instructors who establish percentage cut-offs
for grades of A, B, C, etc. at the beginning of the course and grade strictly in accordance with those
cut-offs; some of you may never have encountered any other practice. This approach is sometimes
advocated on the grounds that it is objective, but that is a misconception. All grading has a large
subjective element, and the only real question is where the instructor chooses to locate that element.
Those who follow this familiar practice place it in the design of their exams: they have to choose
questions to fit their grading scales. I have never found this practice satisfactory; I prefer to place the
subjectivity directly in the grading. Specifically, I prefer to make up exams that test what I want to test
and then to interpret them in the joint light of the overall class performance and my expectations, which
are based partly on my perception of the difficulty of the questions and partly on long experience with
this course.

This has some consequences that many of you will probably find a bit disturbing, at least at first.
Because I’m more interested in your understanding of concepts than in your ability to solve routine
problems of types that you’ve seen before, my exams tend to be a bit on the challenging side, and the
numerical scores correspondingly lower than you’re probably accustomed to seeing. But I don’t deny
that this makes it difficult for you to know just how well you’re doing, and I will do my best to give
you an indication after each exam.

Finally, I’m a firm believer in partial credit: an answer needn’t be perfect in order to display some
understanding or an intelligent approach.

Disabilities Statement: Students with disabilities that may affect their ability to complete course
requirements in this class may request appropriate accommodations by registering with the Office of
Disability Services in MC-147 (phone: 216-687-2015) and discussing the nature of their situation; for
more information see <http://www.csuohio.edu/offices/disability/>.

Cheating: Very simply, don’t. For information on the official CSU policy in the CSU Code of Student
Conduct at <www.csuohio.edu/studentlife/StudentCodeOfConduct.pdf >.
 Course Outline for Discrete Mathematics

The numbers following the hyphens are section numbers in the text.

(1) Counting

Counting and probability – 2.1, 7.1

Properties of sets – 2.2, 2.3
Strings and Permutations – 2.4, 2.5
Birthday problem and Stirling’s Formula – 2.5
Counting Subsets of a set: Combinations – 4.1, 4.2
Binomial theorem, Pascal’s Triangle – 4.3, 5.1
Permutations and Combinations with allowed repetition – 4.4, 4.5, 4.6

(2) Induction and Recursion

Sequences
Sum of odd numbers – 3.1
Subset counting revisited – 3.2
Counting Regions – 3.3
Recursively defined sequences – not in text
Solving recurrence relations by Iteration – not in text
Fibonacci Numbers – 6.1, 6.2
Second-Order Linear Homogeneous Recurrence Relations with Constant Coefficients – not in
text

(3) Integers, divisors, and primes

Divisibility of integers – 8.1

Primes and their history – 8.2
Factorization into primes – 8.3
On the set of primes – 8.4
Fermat’s Little Theorem – 8.5
The Euclidean Algorithm – 8.6
Testing for primality – 8.7

(4) Graph Theory

Graphs – 9
Trees – 10
Finding the optimum – 11
Graph coloring (time permitting) – 13

(5) Introduction to Cryptography (time permitting)

A glimpse of cryptography – 15
One-time pads – 16