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
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.)
- January 7: Introduction to the Honors Program
- January 14: Structured Programming. Readings:
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.
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.
- January 21: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (No Class)
- January 28: Privacy, Security, Distributed Computing primer in preparation for the
Distinguished Lecture by Prof. Joan Feigenbaum
-
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)
- Vannevar Bush,
As We May Think,
Atlantic Monthly, July 1945.
-
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.
- Alan Turing, On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,
Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, ser. 2, vol. 42 (1936-7).
- John Von Neumann,
The General and Logical Theory of Automata,
Hixon Symposium on
September 20, 1948, in Pasadena, California
- Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence,
Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 59:433-460, 1950.
- 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
- 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
- Howard Aiken,
Proposed Automatic Calculating Machine,
1938.
- John von Neumann,
First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,
June 30, 1945.
- 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.