HI Guys,

I'm prepping this week's lectures.  I've placed my notes for lecture 7
outside my LCS office in case someone would be willing to look over them
and warn me of possible disasters BEFORE class.  Lecture 7 cover function
terminology, inverses, bijections, common functions and notation, and
Taylor series.  I'm working on Lecture 8 now.  It will cover asymptotic
notation, evaluation of sums, stirling's formula.

After looking over the first 8 lectures, it seems to me that it might
make alot of sense to move the exam back one week and move up the
material on recurrences to lectures 9 and 10 next week.  Lecture 9
could be master theorem stuff and lecture 10 could be on linear
recurrences like Fibbonaci numbers and Tower of Hanoi type problems.
The point is that in 1 week of reccurrences, we're not going to be able
to get in much deeper than that, and at the surface, the easier material
is very closely related to the stuff we did last week and somewhat
related to what we do this week.  It is much less related to what
we had planned to cover in the counting stuff and in fact, that stuff
will be easier if we already covered reccurrences.

If we make the switch, then we might also think about cancelling the
second quiz, which would save us a lecture.

As for the reading on recurrences, I would suggest the chapter in CLR
and the chapter in Liu's book on Combinatorics (although maybe MR
will be enough--I have to look more at it).

In the future, perhaps the following organization fo the course will be better:

1. Proofs, Logic and Induction  (3 lectures: add a lecture and give more
examples of what a proof is, i.e., really answer the question of what
is a proof in math and in reality--i.e., what people do)

2. Sets, Relations, and Functions (4 lectures as they are now, or perhaps
add a lecture here to give more time on basic structures, i.e., define posets)
Note, this part includes asymptotics and the rest of the stuff I'll cover
this week.

3. Algorithms and Data Structures (4 lectures: first lecture as CEL did
lecture 5, next two lectures on solving recurrences as I'd like to do
next week, last lecture on data structures as CEL did lecture 6.  Note
that by putting recurrences here and by already having covered the growth
of functions, we'll save at least half a lecture for more stuff on algorithms.

Put the midterm here now and use the lecture on data structures in the slot
before the exam instead of giving the day off (it sort of sticks out by itself
anyway).

4. Counting and Combinatorics (about 6 lectures--still to come, but without
the recurrences)

5. Probability (about 8 lectures--still to come).

I'll be at home most of today 332-0705 as well as tomorrow am if you want
to talk about it.

Thanks, Tom

PS: is someone bringing copies of the two CLR chapters to class?  We won't
need the taylor series handout I don't think.  If people look lost on
tuesday in classs, then we can hand it out on thursday.