Constant reading assignment: read the book-section to be covered in the upcoming week of lectures, especially the examples worked out in the book.
A weekly homework will consist of 3-4 problems for each day of
the week,
(one for b'fast, one for lunch, one for tea and sometimes one for
supper),
hence approx 25 problems a week. They will
cover a weekly set of lectures
and will generally be posted here by the PREVIOUS Friday.
Doing Homework problems carefully
(most of them require writing proofs)
is EXTREMELY important.
Without this extensive practice, you will almost certainly
fail the tests.
Homeworks will not be graded and will not count towards your grade.
They will be discussed in the
discussion sections on Thursday.
Expect to do homework for at least 9 hours per week on this class,
i.e., NOT including contact hours
Class Mantra
Our class Mantra is from Polya's classic "How to Solve It."
Practice it assiduously!
See / Plan / Do / Check /Lookback -- possibly with multiple iterations.
See: (read and parse the informal problem statement,
model/formalize it, read problem definitions etc);
Plan : (choose strategy and techniques from a collection of
strategies and techniques);
Do: (execute the strategy);
Check: (check the individual steps, do the whole thing another way and
reconcile);
Lookback: (deconstruct solution - is minimal? alternative solution? come up
with similar follow up problems? extend, generalize etc.)
Peer-to-peer learning You are strongly encouraged to form study groups and work together on homeworks -- peer-to-peer learning is highly effective! Canvas forum will be useful for this purpose.