CSCI 5454 - Algorithms - Spring 2015

Course Information Sheet



You are responsible for everything on this handout. Please read it.

Lectures

MW 1:00-2:15pm in ECCS 1B12

Instructors

Final

The final will be Mon May 4th, 1:30pm-4pm.

Prerequisites

Data Structures, Discrete Math, and two semesters of Calculus. We will be assuming a thorough knowledge of basic algebra, logarithms, functions, inequalities, etc., that you will have seen in calculus. You should know basic combinatorics, set theory, math induction, and graph theory. You will also be expected to have facility with a programming language such as C, C++, Python or Java.

Textbook

Algorithms, by Dasgupta, Papadimitriou, and Vazirani. I chose this book because it will be about $80 cheaper than the standard texts. I hope this is something you appreciate, because I'm doing it in the hopes of reducing your costs for textbooks (which, in my view, has gotten out of hand). I don't believe we are sacrificing quality in this decision. The authors are very distinguished algorithms researchers and I like what they've done in this textbook.

Course Web page

We will maintain useful information on the course web page: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~jrblack/class/csci5454/s15/.

Visit the above page regularly to see what's new. If you miss a handout, get it from here.

Grading

There will be periodic problem sets (35%), two midterms (30%), and a final (35%).

Homeworks

Homework will be due in class at the beginning of the hour. If you cannot make it to class, please have someone drop your homework off for you. Please do not email your homework to me. In extreme cases, you can email your homework to our TA, but only after securing permission from me.

Late homework will be accepted for two further days. Each day you lose 20% of the total points. A day is 24 hours. For example, if an assignment is due at 12pm on Monday and you hand it in Tuesday at 12pm, it's one day late. If you hand it in Tuesday at 1pm, it's two days late.

To submit an assignment late, take it to the main office and have a staff member write the date and time, and leave it in my mailbox.

No homework will be accepted after 48 hours.

Cheating

Everything you turn in must be your own work. There are no group assignments in this class unless explicitly given as group assignments. Turning in someone else's work, whether it be from a classmate, a dorm-mate, your parents, someone on the Internet, etc., is dishonest unless you acknowledge in your submission where you took the work from. Putting your name on another's work is called "plagiarism."

Basic Courtesy

There are a few rules I ask you to observe:

Policies: