Description
Learn tools and techniques that will help you recognize when problems you encounter are intractable and when there an efficient solution.
Requrirements
Students are expected to have a solid grasp of the basics of discrete mathematics. Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications by Ken Rosen provides an excellent background for this course. If you answer "no" to any of the following questions, it may be beneficial to acquire background knowledge concurrently or prior to taking the course. Can you show that the sum of the first n numbers is n(n+1)/2? Can you give the proof as an induction on n? Can you give an O(n log n) algorithm for sorting n numbers? Can you describe the difference between breadth-first and depth-first search? Given an nxn matrix A and an n-dimensional vector b, can you give a polynomial-time algorithm to find a vector x such that Ax=b? See the Technology Requirements for using Udacity.
