Welcome to the MODD Zone

(Mathematics Of Digital Data, Period D)
Web address shortcut for this page: www.modd.net/1112modd

Are you nervous when you see NCWEE? concerned when you see CIRC? perturbed when you see PBC? Visit Mr. Hansen’s fabled abbreviations page to make sense of those cryptic markings you see on your papers.

Schedule at a Glance (see archives for older entries) Written assignments should follow the HW guidelines.
T 1/3/012	Classes resume. In class: Review, including overview of the 2004 syllabus and the January 2006 midterm exam.
W 1/4/012	Guy’s presentation. Second half of class: Review.
Th 1/5/012	Richard’s presentation. Second half of class: Review.
F 1/6/012	Peter’s presentation. Second half of class: Review.
M 1/9/012	Exam, 2:00 p.m., MH-102. Bring a calculator and several sharpened pencils with erasers! Content and difficulty will be similar to the 2007 exam. You can find additional sample questions on the 2006 exam and the 2004 syllabus. Note that the 2004 syllabus has answer keys for all the questions! Of course, there will be some differences this year, since we emphasized a different mix of topics. For example, we spent much more time discussing the ins and outs of public-key encryption, and we hardly covered networking at all (except for discussing the concepts of dotted quads for IP addresses, and the 8 groups of 4 hex digits that will be used for 128-bit IPv6 addresses). You would not be expected to know how to answer question #14 on the 2007 exam, but almost everything else there is “fair game.” Your exam is cumulative for all material from September onward. You will not have to perform any Hamming 7-4 computations. (We did that in class, and everyone did fine.) However, you should know what Hamming 7-4 is (an error correcting code) and what it is useful for. Names and capsule bios you should know: · Claude Shannon, Bell Labs, father of information theory, author of Shannon’s Theorem (channel capacity as a function of bandwidth, power, and S/N ratio), also associated with the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem. · Harry Nyquist, also of Bell Labs, famous for the Sampling Theorem (to avoid aliasing artifacts, we must sample slightly more than twice as rapidly as the highest frequency found in the data source). · (Richard) Hamming, also of Bell Labs, mathematician who developed the Hamming codes for error correction. · Alan Turing, father of computer science, worked on cracking the Nazi Enigma cipher during World War II, was later hounded by the British government and was driven to commit suicide. · Hedy Lamarr, actress who dreamed up the idea of spread-spectrum frequency-hopping communication, which is today used everywhere in wireless digital communication. · Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, famous for Moore’s Law (density of transistors, and hence the computing or storage capability at a given price point, essentially doubles every 18-24 months). · RSA, the initials of mathematicians Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman, who published their most famous paper in 1978. You don’t need to remember the names, just the initials. The RSA algorithm for public-key encryption was granted a patent and made its developers famous and successful.

Links Based on Class Discussions:
-- Latest revision of our MODD course outline from 2005, before we had a good textbook to use
-- Homemade “Segway”-like balancing scooter uses a fair amount of calculus!

Serious Links:
-- STA School Handbook
-- Summer math camps for talented high school students
-- Click here for other serious links

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Last updated: 07 Jan 2012