Introduction and Discrete Mathematics Review
Overview
Ideally, all material in the mathematics review should already be familiar, because it should all have been covered in one or more prerequisites for this course. Please read this material, just in case!
The first lecture introduces the subject and learning goals of this course. Details about course administration are also included in this lecture. The lecture activity will introduce alphabets, strings and languages — things that we will be working with, for almost all of the course.
This material will be covered in lectures on September 3 and in tutorials on September 9–10.
Supplemental Material
You should not need any reference material, for this, that is not provided on the course web site. However, a recent CPSC 251 or MATH 271 textbook might be useful. The following books have recently been used in textbooks in these courses.
- S. S. Epp, Discrete Mathematics with Applications
Fifth Edition, Brooks Cole, 2019
- K. H. Rosen, Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications
Eighth Edition, McGraw Hill, 2018
Mathematics Review
Why This is Included
When a required course is as large as this one, students start out with widely varying backgrounds. As a result, some students are disadvantaged (because they are “behind” the rest of the class) right at the start — and it is not always clear that they realize this.
This review material is being provided to help students to assess their backgrounds and to try to “catch up” with the rest of the class, if they need to.
Review Material
- Part One — Notation: [ PDF ]
- Part Two — Definitions and Proofs: [ PDF ]
- Part Three — Mathematical Induction: [ PDF ]
Also of Interest
Lecture #1: Welcome to CPSC 351! (Tuesday, September 3)
Why This is Included
You have to start somewhere! With that noted, an awful lot of this course concerns material that is mathematical and quite abstract. One of the goals, here, is to help students to understand why this kind of material will be studied.
Another goal, here, is to introduce the way this course will be organized, so that future lectures are a little bit less surprising than they otherwise might be.
