I like that they share the lecture notes too. http://i.stanford.edu/~ullman/fcsc-notes.html
great. Commenting for looking at later.
Foundations of Computer Science
51–60 of 89 posts
Re: Foundations of Computer Science
#52I downloaded and merged the individual PDFs into one file, you can grab it here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6428759/merged.pdf
Edit: I did this using commands mentioned in some other comments and some Googling (this only works on OSX):
curl -O http://i.stanford.edu/~ullman/focs/ch[01-14].pdf && /System/Library/Automator/Combine\ PDF\ Pages.action/Contents/Resources/join.py -o ./merged.pdf ./*.pdf
Re: Foundations of Computer Science
#53Would this be a good resource for someone who doesn't have a CS degree and who doesn't necessarily know the foundation of CS?
After skimming through it a bit, and as a CS student, this looks like an excellent introduction to the theory of computer science, especially for someone with no background in it. It corresponds with what I would expect a first or second year university course on Computer Science would cover. After reading some of this, if you're still interested in this sort of thing, the rather infamous Introduction to Algorithms p…
Awesome, thanks for the help and the additional resources!
Re: Foundations of Computer Science
#54Would this be a good resource for someone who doesn't have a CS degree and who doesn't necessarily know the foundation of CS?
Here's the Prerequisites section:
Students taking courses based on this book have ranged from first-year undergraduates to graduate students. We assume only that students have had a solid course in programming. They should be familiar with the programming language ANSI C to use this edition. In particular, we expect students to be comfortable with C constructs such as recursive functions, structures, pointers, and operators involving pointers and structures such as dot, ->, and &.
Re: Foundations of Computer Science
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did not get the impression, from the blog posts, that HOTT was putting forth that CS could or is a super set of math just that it can be used as a foundation for all mathematics, just like set theory or category theory can be.
I think this is where terminology breaks down a bit, but my reading of "basis of" is taken as being loosely equivalent to saying a superset of. In this same sense, logic can be seen as the basis for all mathematics. Anything that is math is also strictly logic, hence math is a subset of logic.
This is a fairly interesting philosophical question. Personally I view (and use) Math as a set of abstractions to understand the world, and use Mathematical Logic to help make Math more rigorous and proofs more checkable. But if it turned out that Mathematical Logic had some flaws as it is formalized today, I wouldn't throw out Probability Theory or Algebra. Instead I would seek a formalization of Mathematical Logic that made those things useful.
I don't think that there's any formal system you can use as the basis of all Math, though. For example, ZFC can't talk about proper classes, but we'd like to be able to make statements about the class of all sets, and the collection of all classes, etc.
Re: Foundations of Computer Science
#56Many people have posted the combined PDF on this thread. However, there is no way to economically print this PDF for self use. Lulu puts the limit at 740 pages and this book weighs in at 790+ pages.
Does anyone know of a cheap online printer that can print at around 2cents/page?
Re: Foundations of Computer Science
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very interesting! I've often got into nasty arguments with people online when I dared to say that Computer science (Computing) was not a subset of math, but rather could be viewed more naturally as a superset. It is good to see serious academic work being done along these lines.
You can have the same debate about logic and mathematics, or to some extent philosophy and mathematics.
You could throw set theory into the ring as well :)
Re: Foundations of Computer Science
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one thing about GaTech that really annoys me. Every professor seems to remove thier notes at the end of every semester and only post them when the content becomes relevent to the course. You cant look ahead and cant reference them afterwards.
> Every professor seems to remove thier notes at the end of every semester and only post them when the content becomes relevent to the course. might this be possibly done because there is not too much variation in course content from one sem to next ?
I'm sure this is the reasoning but it’s a stupid reason. I joined a frat because they have a service where they upload all the notes by class and professor and that caused my average GPA per semester to jump nearly a point.
It’s simply lazy, easy to game, makes crunches nearly unbearable, and interferes with the student’s ability to learn.
It’s also why GT while it has a reputation on par with MIT is actually a much worse school IMO. GT produces results because it lets a large amount of people in and them culls them out by being very difficult. Most GT students are very good at teaching themselves or finding groups such as the frat I’m with to get help.
CS Classes are often more of a hindrance than a place to learn and many of the 3+ students I know stopped attending most classes and are basically self taught my self included those who do go to class study while there and simply keep an ear out for hints about what may be on the test.
There are exceptions, especially after the sophomore year, but in general GT professors simply read aloud same notes for the last 5 years that have a very loose connection to what’s going to be on the test.
Re: Foundations of Computer Science
#59From the first paragraph of the first chapter: > But fundamentally, computer science is a science of abstraction — creating the right model for thinking about a problem and devising the appropriate mechanizable techniques to solve it. Too often in computer science education these days, this essential fact is lost.
So true. People at my school don't always realize that computer science isn't just about programming, it's truly a subset of mathematics.
Ok I'll bite. Why is "creating the right model for thinking about a problem and devising the appropriate mechanizable techniques to solve it" a subset of mathematics?
Re: Foundations of Computer Science
#60From the first paragraph of the first chapter: > But fundamentally, computer science is a science of abstraction — creating the right model for thinking about a problem and devising the appropriate mechanizable techniques to solve it. Too often in computer science education these days, this essential fact is lost.
So true. People at my school don't always realize that computer science isn't just about programming, it's truly a subset of mathematics.
Computer science is a big tent. It's an amalgamation of a lot of different things. If you ask "Is computer science X?" the answer is usually yes.