Meetings
We have lectures on Monday and Wednesdays from 2:30-4 PM in 200 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.
One percent of your final grade will be deducted for each lecture you miss that you have not cleared with me first.
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 Wednesdays. Homework assignments are posted on the website. 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.
- 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 2:30 pm on Wednesday, and you submit it in late but before 2:30 pm on Friday, your maximum score will be 80%. After five days, the homework will no longer be accepted. That is, homework due at 2:30 pm on Wednesday will not be accepted at all after 2:30 pm on Monday. You may not work on late homework during class.
- Homeworks are submitted electronically (see below). You may handwrite your solutions and scan them for submission, if you wish, but your writing must be legible. 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.
- Occasionally, you will need to write code to solve some of the homework problems. You must submit all source code with your homework. Alternatively (and preferably), you may submit your solutions requiring coding as Jupyter notebooks. 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 3.7).
- Homework is submitted as a single attachment to an email sent to beaph161 [at] gmail [dot] com. The filename of the attachment is one of
- lastname_firstname_hw#.pdf: A single PDF containing your solutions. This is the most common mode of submission.
- lastname_firstname_hw#.ipynb: You may submit your homework as Juypter notebooks, if you wish. This is especially convenient for problems that require coding.
- lastname_firstname_hw#.zip: Sometimes you may need to submit a PDF, along with some source code. Everything should be zipped into a single file for submission.
[Homework #] Submission of HW# for Firstname Lastname
For example, a submission for the first homework set would be submitted by email with the subject line "[Homework 1] Submission of HW1 for Barbara McClintock". The attachment would be McClintock_Barbara_hw1.zip containing the files McClintock_Barbara_hw1.pdf and McClintock_Barbara_hw1.ipynb as well as any image files used in the .ipynb document.
Final exam
We will tentatively have an oral final exam. The format will be similar to qualifiying exams adminstered in many graduate programs. You will be given a small set of problems to work on for one hour, and then you will immediately present your solutions over a half hour to me and one of the TAs.
Grading
Your grade in the course is based on homework (at least 70%), the final exam (at most 30%), and any deductions from missed lectures. 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.