The project needs to relate Discrete Mathematics to any area in the IT field. I
ID: 3111223 • Letter: T
Question
The project needs to relate Discrete Mathematics to any area in the IT field. I need your work to focus on how Discrete Math is used in the topic of your choice. The project consists of an essay.
The Essay:
250 - 500 words. Hopefully, this is enough space to allow you to clearly explain your topic. Your sources should be correctly cited. The essay should focus on how Discrete Math is used and related to your topic. The essay should be a general description of how Discrete Math is used within your topic. The essay must be written at an appropriate level for a 3000 level college course
Explanation / Answer
I think a lot of it comes from the fact that discrete structures are easy to operate on in computing, and that computations themselves are usually modeled by discrete concepts.
For example, strictly speaking, formal language theory is a branch of discrete mathematics. It deals with finite structures (strings) in a from a countably-infinite universe. Modelling a yes/no problem as a set of strings allows for a large degree of formal reasoning about computations, so knowing the math/theory behind it is useful for a computer scientist.
Likewise, lots of problems can be reduced to discrete problems. For example, say you want to write a program which schedules a large set of classes so that no student has two classes at the same time. This is in fact a graph theory problem, known as "graph coloring". By knowing the theory behind graph coloring, a programmer realizes first that the problem is NP-complete, so there's not likely a fast general solution, but also can use pre-defined solutions for special types of graphs (chordal, comparability, planar, etc.)
Also, computer science and discrete math share a lot of ground. Both are heavily based in the concepts of recursion/induction.
ust as an example: Graph Theory, as an area of discrete mathematics, is used all over the place. Since we mention complexity, it is interesting to note that many graph-theoretic problems are natural examples of NP-complete problems.
Discrete mathematics" is a somewhat fuzzy concept -- but in some places it is essentially defined as whatever mathematical subjects a generic computer science student needs to know.
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