SUNY Geneseo Department of Mathematics

Lecture List

Math 303
Fall 2015
Prof. Doug Baldwin

Last modified December 10, 2015

Caveat

These are electronic records of class discussion from Math 303 (Theory of Computational Complexity). They are generally captured as a class unfolds, and slightly cleaned up afterwards. They are not clean, carefully-planned lecture notes in the usual sense. They are more an electronic equivalent of notes on the blackboard: they record some of what the instructor said, some of what students said, the things that really happened in the class—including the misunderstandings, false starts, and similar things that happen in real classes. The goal of these notes is as much to help students remember how they learned as it is to help them remember what they learned (because the “how” of learning is at least as important as the “what”).

Please make WWW or other electronic links to this page only—I want people reading these notes to see the “caveat” above.

Send comments, questions, etc. related to these notes to Doug Baldwin.

  1. Sep. 1—Introduction
  2. Sep. 3—Algorithms and Pseudocode
  3. Sep. 8—Analyzing Execution Time
  4. Sep. 10—Asymptotic Notation (and Execution Time)
  5. Sep. 15—Correctness and Loop Invariants
  6. Sep. 17—Loop Invariants, Part 2
  7. Sep. 22—Introduction to Recursion
  8. Sep. 24—Recursion, Part 2
  9. Sep. 29—Introduction to Recurrences
  10. Oct. 1—Recurrences Part 2
  11. Oct. 6—Proving the Master Theorem
  12. Oct. 8—Using the Master Theorem
  13. Oct. 15—Introduction to Lower Bound Arguments
  14. Oct. 20—Hour Exam 1, no notes
  15. Oct. 22—Lower Bounds via Adversary Arguments
  16. Oct. 27—Lower Bounds via Decision Trees
  17. Oct. 29—A Problem with an Exponential Lower Bound
  18. Nov. 3—Polynomial Time Problems
  19. Nov. 5—Hour Exam 2, no notes
  20. Nov. 10—NP
  21. Nov. 12—Polynomial Time Reduction
  22. Nov. 17—Circuit Satisfiability
  23. Nov. 19—NP Completeness from Circuit Satisfiability
  24. Nov. 24—3-CNF and CLIQUE
  25. Dec. 1—Vertex Cover and Hamiltonian Cycle
  26. Dec. 3—Traveling Salesperson and Subset Sum
  27. Dec. 8—Optional Presentations, no notes
  28. Dec. 10—Higher Complexity Classes and Coping with Intractability