CSc 480 -- Great Ideas in Computer Science

Fall, 2002

This course examines several great ideas and problems in computer science. The focus is on contributions of winners of the A.M. Turing Award. This award is given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in recognition of contributions that are of lasting and major technical importance. It is in essence the Nobel prize of computer science.

Instructor

Greg Andrews, Gould-Simpson 705
Office Hours: Tuesday 2:30-4:00, Thursday 2:00-4:00, and by appointment
Email: greg@cs.arizona.edu (or simply greg from CS department machines)

Useful Links

Syllabus. Lecture plan, assignments and grading, and policies. Revised Syllabus (what was actually covered).

Reading List. Assigned papers and others that might be useful.

Turing Awards. The full list of Turing Award winners and links to their citations.

Turing Award Lectures. Bibliographic information for all the lectures.

ACM Digital Library. A UofA library Web page that contains information about and a link to the ACM Digital Library. That library contains a wealth of information, including a large percentage of the papers written by the Turing Award winners.

Google. The standard in fast, effective Web search engines.

Assignments and Exams

Below are links to Postscript (PS) and PDF copies of homeworks and exams as they are assigned. You should be able to view one or both of these formats. If not, install an application such as gv, ghostview, GSview, or Adobe Acrobat Reader, and configure your browser to use it.

Questions on Java: PS, PDF
Questions on Algol 60: PS, PDF
Questions on Hoare's paper: PS, PDF
Questions on Backus's paper: PS, PDF
Quiz on grammars and parsing: PS, PDF
Questions on Karp's paper: PS, PDF
Questions on Traveling Salesman Problem: PS, PDF
Questions on Random Numbers: PS, PDF
Questions on Cryptography: PS, PDF
Questions on Architecture: PS, PDF
Questions on Pipelining and Parity: PS, PDF
Questions on Dijkstra's THE paper: PS, PDF
Questions on Hamming Codes and Multics: PS, PDF
Questions on Unix: PS, PDF
Questions on Lampson's paper: PS, PDF
Questions on Artificial Intelligence: PS, PDF

Examination 1: PS, PDF
Examination 2: PS, PDF

Final Project: PS, PDF

Two Interesting Final Projects

Heather Lo, "Dorothy Denning: A Look at Secure Computer Systems," Word Document
Noah Snavely, "Noise Functions," Postscript


Last updated February 10, 2003