Meetings
We have lectures on Monday and Wednesdays from 1-2:30 PM in 100 Broad. Attendance is mandatory. We will be having discussions and doing exercises together during lecture, so it is important that you be there. I understand that you may miss a lecture from time to time, for graduate school visits, etc., but I ask that you make every effort to come to class. If you are concerned that you may out of necessity miss too many lectures, please talk with me and we can try to work out arrangements.
Lectures are a very important time for me to interface with you. As we have discussions in lecture, we both learn, and I get a good idea of how you are doing with the material. I therefore often find it distracting when students use laptops in lecture. Nonetheless, I do not what to take away your preferred method of note-taking, if that is the case, so laptops are allowed in lecture. I do ask that you use laptops and tablets strictly for note-taking purposes. Cell phones must be completely silenced and put away.
Lectures may not be recorded without my permission. If you miss a lecture, I invite you to discuss what you have missed with a classmate, your TAs, or with me.
I also strongly recommend you attend my and/or the TA office hours.
Homework
Homework will be assigned roughly weekly, typically assigned and due on Mondays. We will not have any exams. Homework assignments are posted on the website. The due date and time, usually one week after posting, is indicated on the website and on the homework PDF. The homeworks will not always have "right answers," but are always aimed at making you think about the central concepts of the course. Following are homework policies.
- Homeworks must be handed in as a hard copy unless announced otherwise or prior arrangements have been made with the instructor or TAs.
- Each homework has a defined due date and time, usually at the beginning of class. Late homeworks are accepted with a 10% deduction for every day they are late. For example, if the homework is due at 1pm on Monday, and you turn it in late but before 1pm on Wednesday, your maximum score will be 80%. You may not work on late homework during class.
- All homeworks must either be typed or written in legible handwriting. You will lose points for illegible homework. Mathematical expressions must be clearly presented with all variables defined.
- You are encouraged to discuss the homework with your classmates, but your explanations and derivations must be your own.
- You may not refer to homework problems from previous editions of this course. You also may not refer to solutions manuals, etc., for problems assigned from textbooks. In general, "homework by Google" is ill-advised. Slogging through a tough problem is often the best way to learn a concept, which is the whole point of the homework.
- Occassionally, you will need to write code to solve some of the homework problems. You must submit all source code with your homework in fixed-width font. The code must have reasonably good style and be well-commented. You may use whatever programming language you like, but tutorials and homework solutions will use Python. You are therefore encouraged to download and install the Anaconda Python Distribution (Python 3.5).
Grading
Your grade in the course is based entirely on homework. The homeworks are all worth roughly the same number of points, but there may be some variation.
Course communications
Please use the class Piazza page for questions course topics and homework. I encourage you to make your questions public so that everyone can benefit. Most of our mass communication with you will be through Piazza, so be sure to set your Piazza account to give you email alerts if necessary.