Proseminar in Cognitive Science

(This course is a requirement for the Certificate in Cognitive Science)

Professor: Bruce Tesar

Monday/Wednesday, 2:50 - 4:10 pm

Room 108, Linguistics

College Ave

185:600 Sem Cog Sci I Index # 51578

Cross Listed With

615:610 Formal Methods for Linguistics

**Linguistics students wanting to use this as out of dept credit for theCertificate should sign up under the Cog Sci number
This graduate course presents a collection of ideas from mathematics and computer science that are of particular relevance to linguistics. The course does not require a strong background in mathematics, in fact it is intended for students with little or no advanced knowledge in mathematics and computer science. The relevance of these ideas for linguistics and language-related research will be a running theme of the class.

Graduate students from other departments who have an interest in language-related cognitive research are encouraged to register.

The topics to be covered include the following:

(1) Algebraic concepts - logic, boolean algebra, order and lattices
(2) Cardinality - counting and infinite sets
(3) Mathematical Reasoning - predicate calculus, mathematical induction
(4) Computation - formal languages and automata, language processing
(5) Mathematical Analysis - brief introduction to calculus
(6) Statistics - probability, hypothesis testing, bias and variance
(7) Learning Theory - learning as search, hypothesis spaces, gradient ascent

For further information, please contact Bruce Tesar

(tesar@ruccs.rutgers.edu).
For Special Permission number:

Write to Trish Anderson at trish@ruccs.rutgers.edu

or call 445-0635