15-355: Modern Computer Algebra

Computer Science Department

Carnegie Mellon University

The goal of this course is to investigate the relationship between algebra and computation. The course is designed to expose students to algorithms used for symbolic computation, as well as to the concepts from modern algebra which are applied to the development of these algorithms. This course provides a hands-on introduction to many of the most important ideas used in symbolic mathematical computation, which involves solving system of polynomial equations, analytic integration, solving linear difference equations, and proving combinatorial identities. It is expected that students should be able to handle modest amount of programming in Mathematica.

Prerequisite: 15-251.


Complex roots of Littlewood polynomials.
Roots are colored according to the Mahler measure associated with each polynomial.<
The radius of the outer circle is the golden ratio.
Here is the Mathematica source code.