Functional Programming in a Discrete Structures Course

Marius Minea

About the Event

To bring discrete mathematics closer to first-year students interested in developing programming skills, I have designed a Logic and Discrete Structures course that also introduces elements of functional programming in OCaml. Early on, this includes simple set operations, and iteration and filtering over lists. Using these building blocks, when discussing propositional logic I show how simplification rules for Boolean formulas can be mapped into code, constructing a basic version of the DPLL algorithm for satisfiability checking. This presents them with the perspective of an important algorithm composed of relatively simple primitives.

Biography

Marius Minea is an associate professor at the Politehnica University of Timisoara, Romania. He received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon with a thesis on model checking for timed systems, advised by Ed Clarke and was then a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests are at the intersection of software analysis, testing and security, where he has led several research projects. He is teaching courses on verification and security, enjoys using live coding in programming classes and has designed a discrete structures course that uses functional programming.

Additional Information

Sponsor(s): CSE

Open to: Public