Topics in Discrete Mathematics
This course is cross listed as a year 3 course
(MATH30002)
and a year 4 course
(MATHM0009).
Basic Information
- Instructors: Matthew Aldridge (m.aldridge@bris.ac.uk), Jonathan Bober
(j.bober@bris.ac.uk), Karen Gunderson (Karen.Gunderson@bris.ac.uk)
- Instructors' offices: The Heilbronn section of the second floor of Howard House
-
Lectures are three times a week, from January 27 to March 7.
Time and place:
- Monday 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. (School of Maths. SM4)
- Wednesday 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. (School of Maths. SM4)
- Thursday 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. (School of Maths. SM2 -- THIS IS A CHANGE
FROM THE ORIGINAL TIMETABLE)
The unit is split into three topics covered by the three instructors. There
will be two weeks on error correcting codes (Bober), then two weeks on graph
theory (Aldridge), then two weeks on colouring graphs (Gunderson).
Office Hour
These will take place on the 2nd floor of
Howard House,
in the Heilbronn section. Note: the door to the Heilbronn section is locked,
but you can knock or use the phone outside the door. Also, the building
entrance is normally open, but sometimes locks when the porter is away; in this
case, there is a phone on the wall next to the door which you can use to call
the 2nd floor or the 4th floor receptionist.
- Thursdays 1:30 to 2:30
- For other times, please email the insructor that you would like to meet
with
Assessment
The will be an one and a half hour written exam during the May/June exam
period. The exam will have three questions, and your best two answers will be
used for assessment.
For students registered for MATH30002, the mark is based entirely on this exam.
For students registered for MATHM0009, 80% of the mark will come from the
exam and the other 20% from a written project. Possible project descriptions
will be given out in week 5 or 6 of the course, after students have had an
oppurtunity to see what the various topics of the course are about.
Notes, exercises, etc.
Error correcting codes
- Notes written by me which pretty
much coincide with what is in the lectures. (Updated on February 3rd.
If you printed the earlier version and you want to print these, you can
start at 12, or page 11 if printing double sided, and all you'll miss are
very small spelling and typo fixes.)
- Homework 1 is due by Thursday
February 6, at 3 p.m. However, if turned in by 3 p.m. on Monday I will try
to mark it before our review day on Thursday.
- Some other resources
-
Coding and information theory by Richard Hamming.
This is a nice book which contains a basic introduction error
correcting codes. The amount of information on error correcting codes
is quite small, and is more basic than what we cover in this course,
but what is there is nice. This book also contains a proof of Shannon's
Theorem, with all the necessary background, and a bunch of other
material with is not quite related to this course but is very nice.
- van Lint
- MacWilliams and Sloane. A nice large book with lots of good stuff.
-
There are a lot of good notes available on the internet. For
example Venkatesan Guruswami has a nice of notes, and links to a bunch of
other nice sets of notes.