Allegheny College Math in CS (Unofficial working page)

Bob Roos, rroos@allegheny.edu

This is more of a personal notebook of ideas, but I've tried to make it useful for others as well.

Last modified: 15 April 2001

Suggestions by course: Allegheny College course #, course name (Ironman course #, course name)

CMPSC 101: Introduction to Computer Science I (CS101 "Programming First" Introduction to programming):
At Allegheny, we do not require concurrent enrollment in discrete mathematics (which, at our school, has an introductory calculus course as a prerequisite). We do require a grade on the mathematics placement exam sufficient to qualify the student for entry into the first college-level math course (calculus 1).
- Conway's Game of Life
- Sums, Sigma, Off-by-one
CMPSC 102: Introduction to Computer Science II (CS102: Data structures and abstraction):
- Hilbert curves, recursion, and "practicality"
CMPSC 250: Algorithms (CS210: Algorithmic Analysis):
- Experimental approach
- Union-Find and Generating Mazes
CMPSC 290: Principles of Software Design (CS361: Software Engineering):
- Keith Devlin, "Do software engineers need mathematics?" (Devlin's Angle column from Oct. 2000, at MAA OnLine)
- Formal Methods in Software Engineering Maintained by the IIT Software Engineering Group
- A Software Engineering Resource List for Formal Methods
- A Software Engineering Resource List for Software Architecture with a focus on Formal Approaches
CMPSC 380: Principles of Database Systems (CS245: Databases):
- Queries and intersecting rectangles

Readings

Basic:
The "Math-in-CS.org" web page

Computing as a Discipline. Peter J. Denning, Douglas E. Comer, David Gries, Michael C. Mulder, Allen Tucker, A. Joe Turner, and Paul R. Young. Communications of the ACM Volume 32 , Issue 1 (1989)

Look at (one of these days):

Basic Proof Skills of Computer Science Students. Pieter H. Hartel, Bert van Es, Dick Tromp. Functional Programming Languages in Education, 269-287 (1995), URL = citeseer.nj.nec.com/120473.html.

Integrating mathematics and programming into a three tiered model for computer science education. Ursula Wolz and Edward Conjura. Selected Papers of the Twenty-Fifth Annual SIGCSE Symposium on Computer Science Education, 223-227 (1994).

Applications of Continuous Mathematics to Computer Science by Hung T. Nguyen, Vladik Kreinovich. (Theory and Decision Library. Series B, Mathematical and Statistical Methods, Vol. 38). Kluwer Academic Publishers (1997). (YIKES!!! $247.00 !)