Math 331: Mathematical Problem Solving with Computers
Fall 2000

• A description of the course, including grading policies, text , etc.
• We suggest you use pine for dealing with email. The tutorial Getting Started with Pine covers all the basic stuff, and a bit more, and the Pine User's Guide has some more information, as well.
• Using a web browser (which you must already be doing if you are reading this) will also be quite handy. We suggest Netscape Navigator, but Microsoft Internet Explorer is OK if you want. You can get either from Instructional Computing, although more recent versions are available from Netscape and Micro$oft.
• We may sometimes have documents on the web which are in PDF form (Portable Document Format). To read these you will need to have a copy of the freely available Adobe Acrobat Reader on your machine. You can get this from Adobe.
• We will be using Maple extensively. Some locally produced notes (which will change as the semester progresses) are available, either web browsable or as a PostScript document. Other useful information about using Maple can be found in various places on the web, including a nice collection of some stock answers to maple questions at MIT, a collection of maple resources (including a tutorial or two) at Indiana University, the Maple lab manual from Worcester Polytechnical Institute, and, of course, the home of Maple at Waterloo Maple Software. You can purchase a student version of maple for your own computer, if you want.
• Since we will be doing most of our work (in class at least) on a Unix system, you should look over Using Unix. Also useful are the UNIXhelp tutorial, and sections of UNIX is a four-letter word.

• In order to make it easier for you to keep up with the lectures, any Maple worksheets from each lecture will be available from this page. These are saved in files named by the date of the lecture for section 1 and section 2.
• Homework policy: Each exercise is worth 10 points and can be turned in at any time before its ``expiration date''. You can work on any number of problems per homework sheet (none to all, usually 5). However, at the end of the semester, we will expect you to have turned in at least 3/5 of the exercises assigned. If you do more, we will pick your best grades. If you do less, the missing grades will be counted as zeros. This will determine 20% of your final grade for the class.
• How to submit your homework: From a Unix shell, use the command

  submit331 -sectno file1 file2 ... filen
  

  where sectno is your section number (1 or 2) and file1, file2, etc. are the Maple worksheets you want to submit
  We strongly recommend that you use one worksheet per problem, and that you choose appropriate names for your files. For example, suppose you are in section 1 and you solved problems 01, 03, 06, saving the corresponding worksheets in the files prob01.mws, prob03.mws, prob06.mws. Then you can submit them by typing

  submit331 -1 prob01.mws prob03.mws prob06.mws
  

  
  
• Problems Week 1 (Sep 4, 00), #01-#05. Due Sep 20.
  • Printable versions available in PDF, DVI and Postscript formats.
• Problems Week 4 (Sep 25, 00), #06-#09. Due Oct 12.
  • Printable versions available in PDF, DVI and Postscript formats.
• Problems Week 6 (Oct 9, 00), #10-#16. See individual problems for expiration dates.
  • Printable versions available in PDF, DVI and Postscript formats.

Some notes on cryptography written by Charles Blair of the University of Illinois (also available as Postscript or LaTex).
Learning About Cryptography, by Terry Ritter of Ritter Software Engineering. He also provides a good list of cryptography-related books. Two of these worth noting are
• A Course in Number Theory and Cryptography (Graduate Texts in Mathematics, No 114) by Neal I. Koblitz. (Hardcover, 235 pages, Springer Verlag, 1994)
• The Codebreakers; The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet, by David Kahn. (Hardcover, 1181 pages, 1996, basically a reprint of the 1967 classic.)
The Cryptography FAQ has all sorts of good stuff in it.
There are a large number of links to cryptography related sites on the Quadralay Cryptography Archive. Also, the International Cryptography Pages has both links and brief descriptions of currently used cryptographic algorithms.
RSA Data Security, owners of the patent on the RSA algorithm, provide Frequently Asked Questions on Cryptography, which is good, if a little self-serving.

• The first project, dealing with least-squares fitting, is due on October 2. The data you need to do the project can be found here, in a file corresponding to your username.
• The second project, dealing with cryptography, will have a due date set shortly. You should get to work on it right away.