Reviews for CMSC452

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William Gasarch CMSC452 Expecting an A tybug 05/30/2021	A good lecturer that talks about interesting (and arguably obscure) topics. The biggest complaint I have is that his notation is usually odd and confusing (coming from a more formal mathematical background) and inconsistent, and things are sometimes hand-waved. To give a specific example, we went over the pumping lemma, and the only limitation he gave was that it applied to strings which are "long enough". No justification for what that meant. I had to learn the pumping lemma myself more rigorously outside of class to understand what the formal restrictions are on the strings it applies to. He's also a very eccentric guy. Not that I minded; I actually found it a little endearing.
William Gasarch CMSC452 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/11/2018	Gasarch is an interesting individual but makes the class a lot of fun. He's much more interested in students understanding the material than he is in grades or teaching style. He's pretty fair with homeworks and tests and usually if you know how to do all of the homeworks you will do fine on the test. He goes very fast during lecture but will try to slow down if someone asks. Sometimes he's a bit insensitive with what he says but is generally very nice.
William Gasarch CMSC452 Expecting an A AlexFowler 05/12/2014	Professor Gasarch does a great job in lecture and is always willing to help his students reach reach an understanding of the material that he talks about in class (some of which is definitely not easy). There were numerous times during the semester where Gasarch could be found in his office well after his stated office hours answering student questions and giving homework hints. He is very responsive to email as well. I would highly recommend professor Gasarach although it is definitely true that a strong math background would be very helpful for his course.
William Gasarch CMSC452 Expecting a B zaqu413 05/16/2013	Lecutre: Gasarch is a good lecturer. He will try to get you involved and questions are always welcome. He makes lecture a little more interactive than most professors. He also talks fast, which might take you a week to get used to. Book: He lists 4 books that are all optional. I bought the "Introduction to the Theory of Computation" by Sipser book and really liked it. I would definitely suggest it if you think you will need a book for this course. HW: After having Kruskal for cmsc250&351 I was used to HW's being impossibly difficult. This is (thankfully) not true in Gasarch's class. Most of the problems are of medium difficulty, with a scattering of very hard and really easy. If the problem seems really easy then it probably is, don't second guess yourself. Content: Beware, I found the second half of the course (Decidability & NP/P stuff) to be very hard, and I think most people would agree. For those wondering the first half of the course was on Finite Automaton, Regular Languages, DFA/NFA/Regex/CFG. Exams: Midterm: 35% of grade Final: 41% of grade Midterm was fairly easy as long as you knew understood everything, he will ask you to explain what you are doing, not just do it (this is so you don't just blindly follow the algorithms). Final was harder as it tested the NP/P etc. stuff. You get a cheat sheet mainly so you don't have to memorize the algorithms. Finally: I took this course concurrently with CMSC330 and I think it actually gave me an advantage in both courses. Since I read the first two chapters of the Sipser book the week before school started I was not behind in 452 and the work we did in 452 really helped me when we formally covered DFA/NFA in 330.