This course is part of the General Education program at Saint Mary’s. It will allow you to
- improve your ability to think about complex problems by modeling word problems in mathematical form and carrying out the solution
- improve your quantitative skills by planning, carrying out, and checking the computations required to produce and interpret numerical solutions to problems
- improve your communication skills for technical material by reading mathematical material and write solutions and explanations using correct language and organization
- appreciate the mathematical way of thinking and working; in particular, persistence, independence, and precision in the use of language and concepts.
The mathematical content of the course is taken from discrete (non- continuous; not calculus-based) mathematics. Topics to be studied are those useful in a variety of applications and in understanding many public issues (economics, medical research, political and business planning, etc.) in which uncertainty or variation are important or optimization is a goal. The topics are:
- Set Theory (as a basis for classification and description)
- Numerical Combinatorics (enumeration, counting of possibilities)
- Probability (the mathematical approach to uncertainty and the language used for stating conclusions in medical and economic studies)
- Basic statistical terminology (random variables, basic description of “typical value” and variation)
- Linear Programming (the current work-horse for maximizing gain, minimizing costs in constrained situations)
This course is a prerequisite for Math 114 (Introduction to Statistics); it builds the groundwork in probability.
This page will be occasionally updated to provide access to documents for the course, but most access will be through the Blackboard site (Students enrolled in class log in with own ID & password - others may log in as "guest" with password "guest" but will not have access to all feaures)
For dates, course requirements, for the current/most recent semester semester (currently Fall 2007) see the Current Syllabus
Here is a Current list of assignments
Other pages with resources for the course:
Maintained by cpeltier@saintmarys.edu
Last update 8/16/2007