This can cause great cost and tragic suffering. For example, patients have been killed by overdoses of radiation because of incorrect algorithms. The American astronauts aboard the space shuttle Challenger were killed because of an incorrect geometric algorithm used in rebuilding the booster rockets. In fact a nuclear world war could be caused by an incorrect algorithm. Therefore it is very important to design correct algorithms.
Students often have trouble proving the correctness of algorithms.
This course will emphasize proving the correctness of algorithms. Students should consult the course web page regularly. This page contains several sections which we will now describe. The bulletin board at the beginning contains messages from me to you of important day to day changes of events, matters related to the assignments, etc and should be checked every week-day . This web page contains a detailed list of topics covered in every lecture.