Lab Assignments

If you haven't received an e-mail about your lab, please contact the HTA immediately!

Labs are the weeks of Feburary 5, February 19, March 4, and April 8.

Mailing List Archives

Archives for messages sent to the student list are available here. Note that you will need to log in with your CS email address and LDAP password. If you don't know your LDAP password, you can reset it by

1. logging in to a department Linux system
2. running the "kinit" command and authenticating with your Kerberos (login) password
3. running "/local/bin/ldappasswd" to set a new LDAP password.

Course Description

A single algorithmic improvement can have a greater impact on our ability to solve a problem than ten years of incremental improvements in CPU speed. In CS157, we study techniques for designing and analyzing algorithms.

FAQs

What is CS157 all about? We study algorithms and data structures for a wide variety of problems in Computer Science.

Why study algorithms? The goal is to build a deep(er) understanding of fundamental algorithmic paradigms such as Divide and Conquer, Dynamic Programming, Greedy Approaches, and Approximation.

How are we going to do that? We emphasize rigor in our proofs of correctness and runtime.

Are there any prerequisites? The prerequisites are: ((CS16 or CS18 or CS19) and CS22) (or equivalent). This is targeted to approximately junior undergraduates who have enjoyed basic data structures and algorithms and want to go beyond that, in particular the problem solving and rigorous analysis perspective.

Meeting Time

Lectures will be held every Tuesday and Thursday, from 10:30 to 11:50 AM, in S. Frank Hall for Life Science MARC.

Course Textbook

You have two choices for course textbook. It is recommended that you get at least one of them. Note that the first one is available free of charge from Umesh Vazirani's web page.

The first is Algorithms by Sanjoy Dasgupta, Christos Papadimitriou and Umesh Vazirani, McGraw Hill 2008, ISBN 978-0-07-352340-8. This book is more concise, but doesn't go into as much detail as the other book.

The second is Introduction to Algorithms by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, and Clifford Stein, MIT Press 2009, ISBN 978-0-262-03384-8. This book is much more detailed than the other, but is substantially more ponderous.

Copies of the former have been ordered at the Brown bookstore. (Alternatively, students may try the following website, created by a Brown student, that supposedly makes it easy to search Amazon, Half.com, and Abebooks.com to find the lowest prices for textbooks.)