Skip to content

Category Archives: Education

Probabilities in Proofreading

Suppose you write a program and you send the source code to two of your friends, and . Your two friends read the code and when they finish, A errors are detected by , B errors are detected by , and C errors are detected by both. So, in total, A+B-C errors are detected [...]

A Calculational Proof of the Handshaking Lemma

In graph theory, the degree of a vertex A, d.A, is the number of edges incident with the vertex A, counting loops twice. So, considering graph 0 below, we have d.A=3, d.B=3, d.C=1, d.D=3, and d.E=2.
A well-known property is that every undirected graph contains an even number of vertices with odd degree. The result first [...]

Calculational proofs are usually direct

jd2718 asked in his blog if anyone knew a direct proof of the irrationality of   . In this post I present a proof that, even if some don’t consider it direct, is a nice example of the effectiveness of calculational proof. But first, there are two concepts that need to be clarified: direct proof and [...]

In Defense Of Computer Science

Very good post from Paper Trail:
So why study computer science? The job prospects at the end are usually pretty good – because, if nothing else, you can become a pretty good software developer fairly quickly – but they are unknown. My argument is that the study of computer science is enough of an incentive enough [...]

The programmers of tomorrow

A recent article written by Dr. Robert B.K. Dewar and Dr. Edmond Schonberg (both from AdaCore Inc.) is generating some discussion on the state of Computer Science (CS) education in the United States. In “Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?“, Dewar and Schonberg claim that U.S. universities are training unqualified and [...]