Math 5251 Fall 2006

Syllabus and Class Information

• Syllabus (last revised on 09/06/06)
• List of typos in the textbook
• Summary of Noisy Coding [PDF]

Homework

Homework assignments will be posted online; as announced in class I can provide you with a hard copy if you have only occasional access to the web.

• Homework 1 (due 9/25): available as a PDF or web document. Hints
• Homework 2 (due 10/11): available as a PDF.
• Homework 3 (due 11/1): available as a PDF.
• Homework 4 (due 11/20): available as a PDF.
  • You might also want PDF pictures of trinary words of length 3 and the corresponding empty grid.
• Homework 5 (due 11/29): available as a PDF.
• Homework 6 (due 12/13): available as a PDF.

I've also posted a partial list of Homework Solutions For Chapters 1-4 [pdf] and Solutions to Homework 6 [web].

Exams

Books, notes and calculators are not allowed on exams. The good news is that this means I'll stick to the most important formulas, and the numbers will all be reasonable enough for hand calculations.

Study Guides

• Exam 1 Study Guide. I looked around and found another professor's take-home midterm for this class, which might be useful to help you study, but be aware that as a take-home test, the problems are harder than we'll have on our in-class exams.
• Exam 2 Study Guide. You can see another professor's second midterm, but the topics don't match up exactly. Question #3 covers material which isn't on our test, and we didn't talk about ideals (#6) very much. His exam leaves out some things (like chapter 13) that will be on ours. Doing Homework 4 would be good practice for these.

Exam Solutions

• Exam 1 Solutions (fixed a typo on 12/7; let me know if there are others)
• Exam 2 Solutions

Gradelines

We record your numeric scores, not letter grades, but to give you an idea of how you're doing in the class I post approximate gradelines here. If the A line is 90, that means 90 is the lowest score in the A range, so it's the lowest A-. 89 would be the highest B+ in that situation.

• Homework gradelines are through HW 3, out of 60 possible points.
• Exam 1 had very few scores between 60 and 85, making it hard to set the B and C gradelines. (I couldn't look at a number of tests with 75's and decide, "Is this B or C level work?") If you blew one 25 point question on Exam 1 and ended up in the 70s because of it, you're probably much closer to B level work than those lines indicate. [This is why we record numeric scores in our gradebook...]

Links to related Materials

• We used poker hands to practice our counting skills in class. If you'd like more information:
  • Tom Davis counts hands when aces must be high, so that A-1-2-3-4 is not a straight.
  • Wikipedia does a decent job of explaining how to count hands when aces can be high or low.
• White paper on CRCs in USB
• Paul Garrett has written a Euclidean Algorithm Applet for integers.
• A partial list of primitive roots.