Course syllabus

Course schedule

January 17

Intro to course, decisions. The decision was to read together A Mathematical Theory of Communication, by C.E. Shannon

January 24

Ben MacDonald: what is a communication system, capacity of a discrete noiseless system

January 31

Ryan Grindle: continuation of the discussion of recurrence relations and their asymptotic growth from last time, beginning of the discussion of Theorem 1

February 7

Rob Galloway Jr.: Discussion of Theorem 1 on page 384

February 14

Ben Emery: Proof of Theorem 1 of page 384 (which is itself in Appendix 1)

February 21

Francis Baffour-Awuah Jr.: Sections 2 and 3

February 28

Ryan Grindle: Sections 4 and 5, graphical representation of a Markoff process and ergodic stochastic processes

March 7

Ben MacDonald: Review of Section 5, Section 6, including the proof of Theorem 2 which is in Appendix II.

March 21

Rob Galloway Jr.: Finish up the proof of Theorem 2.

March 28

Ben Emery: Finish up Section 6; properties of the entropy function and conditional entropy.

April 4

Francis Baffour-Awuah Jr.: Section 7, but with no theorems

April 11

Class canceled

April 18

Short presentations: Francis Baffour-Awuah Jr., “Qualitative Analysis of Insect Outbreak Systems: The Spruce Budworm and Forest” by Ludwig, Jones, and Holling.

April 25

Short presentations: Rob Galloway Jr. and Ryan Grindle

May 2

Short presentations: Ben Emery and Ben MacDonald