This page contains some basic information about the course and links to occasional handouts and other useful material.
Additional information about the method of converting your performance to grades: A weighted average performance will be calculated by taking the weighted average of the percentages of your achievement on the homeworks, the two midterms, and the final (with the weights given in the course information sheet). Considering this as a score between 0 and 100, it is converted to a grade using the following "guaranteed thresholds": D- from 35, D from 40, D+ from 45, C- from 50, C from 55, C+ from 60, B- from 65, B from 70, B+ from 75, A- from 80, A from 85, A+ from 93. (The expression "guaranteed threshold" means that I keep the right of giving a better grade if I find it appropriate by someone's activity, quality of performance, etc, in case it needs the addition of at most 3 points to the achieved score. But this is the exception, not the rule, the standard conversion is the one given above.)
For a course description, topics covered, and prerequisites, see the BSM course page.
Collaboration with fellow BSM students in solving homework problems: This is allowed with the understanding that this can mean discussing the problems and thinking on them together in smaller groups and not copying the solutions of others. In particular, you are supposed to work alone when you write up your solutions and not to use the written solutions of others. What you can possibly use is your own notes made when you were thinking together. In case you solved a problem in collaboration, I appreciate if you write it as a note on the submitted solution sheet acknowledging that you worked together with fellow students specifying on which problems and with whom you collaborated. This will have no effect on the score you receive on the problem, it is asked simply to follow the standards of research communities (having in mind that probably several of you plan to go on to research). The latest homework assignments will be posted on this site.
The current homework will always be here.
1. Handout on Cayley's theorem.
2. Handout on the fractional chromatic number.
3. Jirí Matoušek's excellent book I mentioned has its corresponding chapters freely available here as Sections 3.3-3.5, see also Chapter 2. (These are postscript files. In case you could not open postscript files, you can find here their pdf versions: Subchapter on Kneser's conjecture and Chapter on the Borsuk-Ulam theorem.)
4. Schrijver's paper containing the proof of also the second statement of his theorem, i.e., the vertex-color-criticality of Schrijver graphs, can be found here,