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

8784 & 8785 Section: MW 11:40-1pm online on Zoom.
See BrightSpace for the link.

Instructors

Justin Curry
Brian Heller (TA)

Web Design

Marco Varisco

Semesters

Fall 2023

Fall 2023

Nota Bene: Registered students must submit HW via the servers.

August 21
Lecture 1 video, Jupyter notebook, and LIVE exercises.
History of the course. Arithmetic operations in Python. Introduction to functions and scalar data types. Syllabus for this semester.
 
August 23
Lecture 2 video, Jupyter notebook, and LIVE exercises.
PS01 posted, due 9/8/23.
Indentation. If-Then logic. Comparison operators. Branching programs. Looping programs: while, for, and range.
 
August 28
Lecture 3 video, Jupyter notebook, and LIVE exercises.
PS00 due by midnight!
Linear search versus bisection search. How to use this to compute square roots. Review of functions and NoneType.
 
August 30
Lecture 4 video, Jupyter notebook, and LIVE exercises.
Default values for functions. Docstrings. Abstraction. Recursion.
 
September 4
NO CLASS MONDAY
Remember to prep for Wednesday September 6, for Lec05 and PS01, which is due Friday September 8th!
 
September 6
Lecture 5 video, Jupyter notebook, and LIVE exercises (v2).
PS01 due Friday 9/8!
Python Tutor. Iterative versus Recursive Implementations. Methods on Strings. The Subset-Sum problem.
 
September 11
Lecture 6 video, Jupyter notebook, and LIVE exercises.
Collection Data Types---lists, tuples, sets, and dictionaries---and the Edit Distance on Strings.
 
September 13
Lecture 7 video, Jupyter notebook, and LIVE exercises.
"One Liners" such as list comprehension and lambda functions. Brief introduction to Object Oriented Programming (OOP).
 
September 18
Lecture 8 video, Jupyter notebook, and LIVE exercises.
PS02 due Monday 9/18 at midnight!
More Object Oriented Programming (OOP) and Intro to Data Structures.
 
September 20
Lecture 9 video, Jupyter notebook, and LIVE exercises.
OOP for Mortgages and Plotting.
 
September 25
Lecture 10 video, Jupyter notebook, and LIVE exercises.
Numpy array operations. Simulating random phenomena.
 
September 27
Lecture 11 video, Jupyter notebook, and LIVE exercises.
Randomness vs. Determinism. Frequency stats. Basic Distributions.
 
October 2
Lecture 12 video, Jupyter notebook, and LIVE exercises.
PS03 due Monday 10/2 at midnight!
Basic Hypothesis Testing: signficance levels, 1 and 2 tail tests.
 
October 4
Lecture 13 video, Jupyter notebook, and LIVE exercises.
Intro to Machine Learning via Regression. The Train-Model-Predict Paradigm
 
October 11
Lecture 14 video, Jupyter notebook, and LIVE exercises.
Intro to Machine Learning via Classification. Featurization in Aristotle's Taxonomy. Linear classifiers and the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) classifier.
 
October 16
Lecture 15 video, Jupyter notebook, and LIVE exercises.
Exponential Data, Curse of Dimensionality and Intro to Pandas
 
October 18
MIDTERM. See the Practice Midterm.
Midterm due Sunday 10/22 at midnight!
Covers Lectures 1--14.
 
October 23
Lecture 16 video, Jupyter notebook.
Sorites Paradox and K-Means Clustering
 
October 25
Lecture 17 video, Jupyter notebook, and LIVE exercises
Principal Component Analysis (PCA).
 
October 30
Lecture 18 video, Jupyter notebook, and LIVE exercises
MNIST via PCA+KMeans and KNN. Cluster Purity.
 
November 1
Lecture 19 video, Jupyter notebook, and LIVE exercises
The Bias-Variance Tradeoff. K-Fold Cross-Validation.
 
November 6
Lecture 20 video, Jupyter notebook, and LIVE exercises.
PS04 (Project K-Means) due Monday 11/6 at midnight!
Naive Bayes Classifier. 20 Newsgroup Dataset.
 
November 8
Lecture 21 video, Jupyter notebook, and LIVE exercises
Likelihood, Log-Likelihood, and Logistic Regression.
 
November 13
Lecture 22 video, Jupyter notebook.
PS05 (Donald Trump's Twitter Data + Cluster Analysis) Released. Due Monday 11/27 at midnight!
Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Separating Hyperplanes.
 
November 15
Lecture 23 video, Jupyter notebook, and LIVE exercises
Decision Trees, Entropy, and ID3. The Titanic Dataset.
 
November 20
Lecture 24 video, Jupyter notebook.
Last Lecture: A Holistic View of Data Science.