Proofs for Programmers

Success in upper-level computer science classes often requires
facility with abstract mathematics, including reading and writing
proofs. However, computer science students enter college without
these skills and many find them uninteresting and difficult to learn.
This talk will present the approaches we've used to make this material
more interesting and accessible to students taking the Discrete
Mathematics course at U. Illinois, without "dumbing down" the core
concepts (e.g. proof by induction). It will also discuss the steps
we've taken to maintain a quality experience despite rapid increases
in enrollments.
Margaret Fleck is a Research Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer at
the University of Illinois. She received her BA (Linguistics) from
Yale in 1982 and her PhD (Computer Science) from MIT in 1988. She has
previously taught at the University of Illinois and Harvey Mudd
College, and also worked at Hewlett-Packard Labs. She has worked in
natural language understanding and computer vision, with brief forays
into pervasive computing and domain-specific programming languages.