CSC200/200H, Spring 2015
CSC200/200H, Spring 2015: Undergraduate Problem Seminar
Instructor:
Lane A. Hemaspaandra.
Grad TA:
Taylan Sen.
Undergraduate TAs:
Charles Lehner and
Adam Scrivener.
Course Information Document/Syllabus:
syllabus, V 1.4.0.
Prerequisites: All premajor requirements.
Important
Links:
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Academic Honesty.
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Assistance Services (now renamed CETL, which provides a wide range of services including Disability Support).
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The DBLP Computer Science Bibliography.
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Department, URCS.
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Ian Parberry alone, and with Bob Spillman on
this
page has two guides to presenting a paper.
The more relevant one for this course—despite the fact that it
was written apparently for
neuroscientists and
published (in what venue it appeared is not clear to me from the
page about to be referenced) by
the North American Membrane Society—is
"How to Present a Paper: A Speaker's Guide" (find it via the pdf
link in the "Speakers' Guide for Neuroscientists (2000)" section
of that web page),
by Spillman and Parberry, and it is
about how to present one's own research paper. So, you see, relevant
to this course!
An older article, by Ian Parberry alone, that you can get to from
the bottom of that same web page, is
"How to Present a Paper in Theoretical Computer Science:
A Speaker's Guide for Students" (which is of interest far beyond theoretical
computer science). It is
about how to present well a paper *by someone else*. It can be
found through the pdf
link in the "Speaker's Guide (1988-1995)" block at the *end*
of
the above-linked-to page.
Both of the article just mentioned are old enough that they speak about
using *transparencies* for your talks (but many of the points
still very much apply!), although the more recent
one does charmingly write
"At the moment the North American Membrane Society makes heavy use of
manual transparencies and an overhead projector...
In the future we would expect to see increasing
use of electronic display devices connected to a computer."
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RSI Information.
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Suggestions
Regarding Writing Research Papers (in CSC200 but also in General).
Some of My Favorite Bits of Science Wisdom:
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After solving a challenging problem, I solve it again from scratch,
retracing only the *insight* of the earlier solution. I repeat this
until the solution is as clear and direct as I can hope for. Then I
look for a general rule for attacking similar problems, that *would*
have led me to approach the given problem in the most efficient way
the first time. -- Robert Floyd
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In computer science, elegance is not a dispensable luxury, but a
matter of life and death. -- Edsger Dijkstra
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Imagination is more important than knowledge. -- Albert Einstein
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They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see
nothing but sea. -- Francis Bacon
Other Odds and Ends (Mostly Quotations):
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I don't believe it. Prove it, and I still won't believe it.
--Life, the Universe and Everything
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It was mentioned on CNN that the new prime number discovered
recently is four times bigger then the previous record.
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Sooner or later society will realize that certain kinds of hard work
are in fact admirable even though they are more fun than just about
anything else. -- Donald E. Knuth
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Getting tenure doesn't really change anything.
However, not getting tenure changes everything.
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My late friend Stan Ulam used to remark that his life was sharply
divided into two halves. In the first half, he was always the
youngest person in the group; in the second half, he was always the
oldest. There was no transitional period.
-- Gian-Carlo Rota, "Indiscrete Thoughts"
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some
can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
-- Alan Perlis, Epigrams in Programming
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More Quotes from Dijkstra:
* None of the programs in this monograph, needless to say, has been tested on a machine. (From "A Discipline of Programming.")
* Computer science is not about computers, any more than astronomy is about telescopes.
* The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of whether submarines can swim.
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"Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, and we were underneath it?" [said Piglet.]
"Supposing it didn't," said Pooh after careful thought.
Page Maintained by: Lane A. Hemaspaandra