CS 197: Freshman Honors Seminar

M 14:30-15:20

LWSN 1106

Chris Clifton

Email:

Course Topics

This seminar will cover work that has formed the basis for what computer science is today. While many of our courses cover this material (you didn't make it through 180 without a solid understanding of structured programming, for example), this course will take a different approach: looking at these great advances in the context of their time through reading the original articles.

Course Methodology

If you have things that are of interest to other students, you may use the course email list

Other Resources of Interest to Honors Students

Seminars

• Computer Science Department
• Security Seminar

Opportunities

• CS Undergraduate Research Opportunities list
• College of Science undergraduate research funds (application due March 28) -- contact Robin French (rdfrench@purdue.edu
• Undergraduate Research Poster Symposium (March 31)
• March 12: Intel Internship Information Session
• NSF REU Program in Medical Informatics (MedIX) (summer in Chicago)

CS497 Projects

Course Outline (numbers correspond to week):

Note that access to many of these readings requires a subscription. Purdue has such a subscription, checked by noting if you are using an on-campus IP address. If you want to access them from on campus, you can use a Virtual Private Network to be "virtually" on campus. While ITAP recommends installing the CISCO client, I would suggest trying built-in VPN support (the Windows "new connection wizard" will walk you through it, just look for the word VPN and remember that the server is vpn.purdue.edu . I expect Macs are even easier.)

1. January 7: Introduction to the Honors Program
2. January 14: Structured Programming. Readings:
   • Edsger W. Dijkstra, goto statement considered harmful, CACM 11(3):147-148, 1968.
   and one other reading of your choice on structured programming from before 1980. I offer the following as a suggestion, but you are welcome to look for others. You might start by looking at articles that cite Dijkstra's article.
   • Naur et al., Report on the algorithmic language ALGOL 60, CACM 3(5):299-314, May 1960.
   As we have no class on January 21, I also ask that by January 20 you send a brief report (a few paragraphs) noting the article you read, what you think the main point/contribution is, and how you think our discipline might be different if Dijkstra's article and the one you picked had never been written. Email to clifton@cs.purdue.edu.
3. January 21: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (No Class)
4. January 28: Privacy, Security, Distributed Computing primer in preparation for the Distinguished Lecture by Prof. Joan Feigenbaum
5. Ivan E. Sutherland, Sketchpad: A man-machine graphical communication system, Proceedings of the AFIPS Spring Joint Computer Conference, Detroit, Michigan, May 21-23, 1963, pp. 329-346. (HTML transcription)
6. Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, Atlantic Monthly, July 1945.
7. Stephen A. Cook, The complexity of theorem-proving procedures, in Proceedings of the third annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing, Shaker Heights, Ohio, pp. 151-158, 1971 and Richard Karp, Reducibility among Combinatorial Problems, in R. E. Miller and J. W. Thatcher (editors): Complexity of Computer Computations. New York: Plenum, 85-103.
8. Alan Turing, On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, ser. 2, vol. 42 (1936-7).
9. John Von Neumann, The General and Logical Theory of Automata, Hixon Symposium on September 20, 1948, in Pasadena, California
10. Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 59:433-460, 1950.
11. Johnson, J., Roberts, T.L., Verplank, W., Smith, D.C., Irby, C.H., Beard, M., and Mackey, K., The Xerox Star: a retrospective, IEEE Computer 22(9):11-26,28-29, September 1989.
    Photo
12. Pascal, On His Calculating Machine From Privilege granted May 22, 1649. (Translated from the French by L. Lealand Locke, A. M., Brooklyn, New York.) (See also the original.)
    Photos 1, 2, inside, Liebniz, Inside
13. Howard Aiken, Proposed Automatic Calculating Machine, 1938.
14. John von Neumann, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, June 30, 1945.
15. April 21: Final Class - CS 497 honors project presentations - 1:30-4:30 in LWSN 3102

There will not be a final exam on May 1 at 8am (or any other time.) Once you've completed the final assignment (pick your favorite CS497 project and describe why) you are done for the semester.