Day 17: mat385

Last time

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Today:

• Announcements:
  • I hope that you enjoyed your "spring break" day last Friday, and maybe got the chance to do a little relaxing.

  • Your exams are graded, and I've added 4 points (out of 40) to your scores as a curve (effectively bumping up the Bs to As, etc.).

    I've got a key created from your exams, and one of my own.

  • I haven't gotten to the Section 4.1 homework yet. So that's not included in your midterm grades.

  • Speaking of which, I did submit those, using your two exam grades to represent the 65% of your grade that will come from exams; the homeworks (I dropped the two lowest) represent 25%; and I assumed that you will all successfully navigate the projects.

    Let me know of any questions or concerns.

• Today: 6.3: Decision Trees
  • Searching
  • Sorting
  • Catalan Numbers and Binary Search Trees
  • The marked up pdf for Section 6.3.

• Links:
  • If you check out this code, you'll see where I compute the power set ("all-subsets") of a set, to cover all the bases. I think that the end result is pretty beautiful, too!

  • Recursive in-order, post-order, pre-order in lisp
  • Here is a recursive bubbleSort algorithm in lisp
    (coded up following our author's algorithm, in section 3.3, p. 214, as closely as possible).

    Since I had to grade a bubbleSort problem, I couldn't resist coding it up.

  • I've discovered a really interesting fellow, James Tanton, who makes a fascinating presentation on Exploding Dots!

    James shows us how to conceive of different bases, algebra as arithmetic, the geometric series as infinite algebra, and the Fibonacci numbers as an infinite sequence of dots -- all this, via the magic of exploding dots! Very entertaining.

    We'll probably try to invite this guy to campus -- hopefully this fall. I'm working on that!