University at Albany, State University of New York

College of Arts and Sciences
Department of Mathematics and Statistics

AMAT 502 Modern Computing for Mathematicians

When/Where

Lectures are on
Wednesdays 3-6PM
BB0119 or ZOOM
Office Hours:
Mondays 2:30-4PM
in CK 391
See BrightSpace for for more info.

Instructor

Justin Curry

Web Design

Marco Varisco

Semesters

Fall 2024

Fall 2024

Nota Bene: Registered students must submit Quizzes and Exams via the servers. Submit PS for participation credit by the last day of classes.

Week 1 (8/28)
Meet IN PERSON at Massry Business Center
Review of the Syllabus. Comments on ChatGPT.
Lecture 1 Topics: History of the course. Arithmetic operations in Python. Introduction to functions and scalar data types.
Lecture 2 Topics: Indentation. If-Then logic. Comparison operators. Branching programs. Looping programs: while, for, and range.
Week 2 (9/4)
Meet on ZOOM
Lecture 3 Topics: Linear search versus bisection search. How to use this to compute square roots. Functions and NoneType.
Lecture 4 Topics: Default values for functions. Docstrings. Abstraction. Recursion. Golden Ratio and appearance in Nature.
Week 3 (9/11)
Meet IN PERSON at Massry Business Center
Lectures 1--4 Review: What is a program? Using for and while loops. Functions and using return, rather than print. Finding roots of polynomials. Basic Recursion.
Lecture 5 Topics: Python Tutor. Iterative versus Recursive Implementations. Methods on Strings. The Subset-Sum problem.
Week 4 (9/18)
Meet on ZOOM
Lectures 6 Topics: Collection Data Types---lists, tuples, sets, and dictionaries---and the Edit Distance on Strings.
Lecture 7 Topics: "One Liners" such as list comprehension and lambda functions. Brief introduction to Object Oriented Programming (OOP).
Week 5 (9/25)
Meet IN PERSON at Massry Business Center
Quiz 2 Review: Recursion; Operations on Strings and the Hamming Distance; Lists, Dictionaries, Sets, and Tuples; List Comphrension.
Lecture 8 Topics: "One Liners" such as list comprehension and lambda functions. Brief introduction to Object Oriented Programming (OOP).
Week 6 (10/2)
Meet on ZOOM
Lecture 9 Topics: OOP for Mortgages and Plotting.
Lecture 10 Topics: Numpy array operations. Simulating random phenomena.
Week 7 (10/9)
Meet IN PERSON at Massry Business Center
MIDTERM 1: Covers Lectures 1--9. See the server for the practice midterm.
Week 8 (10/16)
Meet on ZOOM
Lecture 11 Topics: Randomness vs. Determinism. Frequency stats. Basic Distributions.
Lecture 12 Topics: Basic Hypothesis Testing: signficance levels, 1 and 2 tail tests.
Week 9 (10/23)
Meet IN PERSON at Massry Business Center
Lecture 13 Topics: Intro to Machine Learning via Regression. The Train-Model-Predict Paradigm
Lecture 14 Topics: Intro to Machine Learning via Classification. Featurization in Aristotle's Taxonomy. Linear classifiers and the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) classifier.
Week 10 (10/30)
Meet on ZOOM
Lecture 15 Topics: Exponential Data, Curse of Dimensionality and Intro to Pandas.
Lecture 16 Topics: Sorites Paradox and K-Means Clustering.
Week 11 (11/06)
Meet IN PERSON at Massry Business Center
Lecture 17 Topics: Principal Component Analysis (PCA)
Lecture 18 Topics: MNIST via PCA+KMeans and KNN. Cluster Purity. Discussion of Project K-Means.