My Biased Coin

In my algorithms class, at some point, I teach RSA and primality testing. For the corresponding assignment, I usually have students do a ...

One thing they don't warn you about in graduate school -- unless some places have changed their "teaching preparation" classes...

For me, one of the hardest challenges of teaching is making up homework assignments and final exams. For homework assignments, there's ...

About two years ago, I went through a huge failure on a project. In the back of my mind, I always wanted to use this blog as a jumping off ...

As I was reading Freedom to Tinker , catching up on the latest reports of flawed voting machines, I remembered my favorite class project of ...

A few of my students in CS 124 (Algorithms and Data Structures) pointed me to this xkcd cartoon -- amused, no doubt, that we had covered th...

This year, my undergraduate algorithms and data structures class is about 25% women. This is significantly more than average (enough that I...

I just received the class reviews for my Randomized Algorithms class. Historically, I have found my reviews are bimodal. Some students des...

As I mentioned two posts ago, Harvard has an unusual tradition of a "shopping period" -- you don't preregister for a class, bu...

One of the great Harvard "traditions" that I enjoyed as a student is the "shopping period". Students don't pre-regi...

A talk I just went too (by Lynn Stein ) raised the following question for me. While I have some strange ideas about how an algorithms class ...

In a recent "discussion" on another blog, I repeatedly heard the refrain that we ivory-tower pie-in-the-sky university computer sc...

In our department we're looking at the class requirements for Ph.D. students, and in particular breadth requirements. I'll state cle...

I recently received my "desk copy" of the new book Algorithmic Game Theory , edited by Nisan, Roughgarden, Tardos, and Vazirani. W...

Since my colleague Harry Lewis is kind enough to stop by and post comments from time to time, I would be remiss not to encourage everyone wi...

Offhand, I can think the following primary "types" of computer science classes: Classes specialized for graduate students in a sub...

Tangentially related to my previous post on why Harvard should be free (but you pay later through donations), via the Machinist I've l...

A number of times I've had undergraduates ask me, essentially, "What else do you do?", which sometimes is an honest interest i...

After being subjected to the uncompelling arguments of those who think my videotaped lectures should be freely available , I thought I'd...

Next semester, I'm teaching my class on randomized algorithms and probabilistic analysis, based on the Mitzenmacher/Upfal book . Harvard...