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Math 195

Disclaimer: Welcome to this page, such as it is. I'll try to keep at least some course material accessible here, but the pickings are likely to be pretty slim. I'm at Earlham in significant part because I think the right way to do mathematics and to engage in scholarship is as a member of a community of scholars working together in small groups in person. It's difficult for me to see how that process is enhanced by my taking large amounts of my time producing web pages. Time spent writing web pages is time not spent

  1. Seeing students.
  2. Commenting on homework.
  3. Getting ready for class.
  4. Doing mathematics.
  5. Seeing my family.
  6. Being present on, and experiencing, the world God created.

My personal sense is that those tasks count more than web pages, and I've normally allocated my time accordingly. I'll probably do the same this semester. Additionally, I don't particularly enjoy working with the web, in part because it has never been, and is not now, an environment that's very friendly to the 2-dimensional language of mathematics.

Now that I've said that, here's what is available on this page:

Printed Resources: Most of these are in PDF format, since using TeX followed by dvipdfm is one of the few paths to decent-looking mathematical text on the web.

  1. The syllabus for this course.
  2. Atoi(s), a function from Kernighan and Ritchie for converting a string to an integer which uses our algorithm for base conversion.
  3. Third Base, a nice article on why base 3 and balanced ternary might matter to computer scientists.
  4. Herb Wilf on positional number systems and on big-O. Section 2 is useful now; section 1 will be needed for Homework 9.
  5. Homework 1, on base arithmetic.
  6. Homework 1 Solutions.
  7. Examples of Sets as tools in CS. This is just a couple of random excerpts from books on Theory of Computation and on Formal Languages that may suffice to show that computer scientists use set theory.
  8. Homework 2, on set theory.
  9. Homework 2 Solutions.
  10. Homework 3, on relations.
  11. Homework 3 Solutions.
  12. Homework 4, on logic.
  13. Homework 4 Solutions.
  14. Homework 5, reviewing sets 2 and 3.
  15. Homework 5 Solutions.
  16. Handout on Induction. This is one section from Kenneth Rosen's book, Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications.
  17. Homework 6, on induction.
  18. Homework 6 Solutions.
  19. Stuff on Functions.
  20. Homework 7, on functions.
  21. Homework 7 answers.
  22. Last year's midterm.
  23. This year's midterm.
  24. Midterm Solutions.
  25. Homework 8, on complex numbers and types of numbers.
  26. Homework 8 Solutions.
  27. Homework 9, on Big-O and rates of growth.
  28. Homework 9 Solutions.
  29. More Herb Wilf on recurrences.
  30. Homework 10, on recurrences.
  31. Homework 10 Solutions.
  32. Homework 11, on matrices.
  33. Homework 11 answers.
  34. Last year's final.
  35. This year's final.

Stuff for Mic: Let me know if you need help understanding anything here. I mostly wrote this for myself.

  1. Tim's TeX macros.
  2. Tim's LaTeX macros.
  3. Notes on bases.
  4. Notes on sets.
  5. Notes on relations.
  6. Notes on logic.
  7. Notes on induction.
  8. Notes on functions.
  9. Notes on numbers, complex and otherwise.
  10. Notes on Big-O.
  11. Notes on recurrences.
  12. Notes on matrices.
  13. Grade Distribution.

It is also worth looking around in this folder. There are some Maple worksheets used for making some of the figures, as well as eps files of the figures. Here is a gzipped tar archive of this whole site, icluding all those ancillary files.

Tim McLarnan,
Write me.
Professor of Mathematics
Earlham College,
Richmond, IN 47374 USA