Study Guide for Final

CS 270/680 Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science
Instructor: Jeremy Johnson 
Exam date: (Tue. Dec. 14 from 6pm to 8pm)


Students are responsible for material in the lecture notes (lectures 8 - 9) and chapters 12, 13 (sec. 2-4), 14 of the text book.  While the exam will not explicitly cover material covered on the midterms, students are expected to be comfortable with induction in all of its forms and they should be familiar with trees, expression trees, grammars, and proving properties of programs.  Students should be able to use logic (propositional and predicate) logic to describe properties and conditions.  They should understand the relationship between boolean expressions and logic circuits.  They should be able to use truth tables to determine the truth of a boolean expression and an interpretation to determine the truth of a boolean expression with predicates.  They should be able to use the rules of logic to simplify boolean expressions, and to make deductions in both the propositional and predicate calculus.  Finally, students should be comfortable with expression trees and proving properties of expression trees.

There will be four problems (problems may have multiple parts)

  1. Use of logic expressions to describe properties
  2. A logic design and minimization problem
  3. A deduction problem (possibly involving resolution)
  4. An induction problem about boolean expressions

Exam Rules

  1. The exam will be designed to take one hour; however, if necessary I will allow upto 120 minutes.
  2. Students may use a calculator if they want, however, the exam will be designed so that it can be done without a calculator.
  3. Students may not use the text or lecture notes during the exam; however, they may bring one page of notes to the exam.

Practice Problems and Review Session


There will be a review session, where I will go over additional problems as requested, during office hours (4-7:00) on Monday Dec. 13. There are no extra review problems since there is an assignment covering material needed for the midterm.  The solution to optional assignment 7 will be posted at 10 on Monday Dec. 13 and I will go over the solution during the review session.