VU Discrete Mathematics (Winter Term 2025)

Welcome to the web page of "VU Discrete Mathematics".

Here announcements concerning the lecture as well as the exercise sheets will be posted. If slides are presented in the lecture, they will be made available here as well.

Lecture

General Information

Tuesday 8:15h-09:45h, EI 11
Thursday 8:15h-09:45h, EI 11
Last lecture: 11th December.

There are no official lecture notes, but two students who attended the lecture in the past (its old format, not all topics will be treated in the pressent course) took notes: inofficial lecture notes.

Slides presented in the lecture

Literature: On the TISS page of the course there is a list of course-related literature.

Exam

The final exam is will take place on 18th December. In case of failure (score less than 50%) it can be repeated on 30th January. If you fail in the repetition exam, too, then the entire course must be repeated.

Exercises

General

The exercise sessions are organized in two groups both of which take place on Tuesday. The groups take place in lecture hall EI 3A at the following times:

Group 1: 13:15h-14:15h
Group 2: 14:30h-15:30h
Group 3: 15:45h-16:45h

The exercise sessions start on 14th October and end on 16th December.

Registration and attendance are mandatory. Please register in TISS for one of the three groups.

Exercise Sheets

Exercise 1 (Oct 14): Exercise Sheet

Modalities

Prepare the homework given on the exercise sheets before the respective course unit.
For each problem you have solved and you think you can present the solution on the blackboard, tick the appropriate box in TUWEL before the deadline of the respective exercise session.
For all groups the deadline is Tuesday 8:00 a.m. each week.
Attendance to the exercise sessions is mandatory.
After the course, you must have solved 60% of all problems.

Grading

The final grade depends on the percentage of problems you solved, on your presentations on the blackboard and on your score at the final exam.
This means precisely: If P is the precentage of problems you have solved, B is the average score of your blackboard presentations and E is the score at the final exam (where 0≤B≤20, 0≤P≤100 and 0≤E≤40), then your grade is determined as follows:

The overall percentage A is calculated with the formula
- A=B+0.2*P+E
If P<60 or B<10 or E<20, then the final grade is failed, else the value of A determines your grade:
- 42≤A<50 is sufficient,
- 50≤A<60 is satisfactory,
- 60≤A<70 is good,
- 70≤A≤80 is very good.

Further literature

D. Jungnickel: Graphs, Networks and Algorithms, Springer, Berlin, 2007.
M. Aigner: Combinatorial Theory, Springer, Berlin, 1997
R. Diestel: Graph Theory, Springer, Berlin, 2010.
W. Tutte: Introduction to the Theory of Matroids, American Elsevier Publishing Co., Inc., New York, 1971.
L. Comtet: Advanced Combinatorics, D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht, 1974.
M. Bona: Introduction to Enumerative Combinatorics, McGraw Hill Higher Education, Boston, MA, 2007.
M. Aigner: A Course in Enumeration, Springer, Berlin, 2007.
P. Flajolet and R. Sedgewick: Analytic Combinatorics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009.
B. van der Waerden: Algebra (Vol.1), Springer, New York, 1991.
T. Hungerford: Algebra, Springer-Verlag, New York-Berlin, 1980.
R. Lidl and H. Niederreiter: Finite Fields, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997.
F. McWilliams and N. Sloane: The Theory of Error-Correcting Codes, North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam-New York-Oxford, 1977.