Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of Mechanical Engineering 6.050J/2.110J – Information, Entropy and Computation – Spring 2008

Unit 1: Bits
Unit 2: Codes

Schedule

Units 1 and 2 are in a single week. After the first week, there will be one unit per week.

Lecture Handouts

Students who for any reason did not receive these items can pick them up in Room 38-344. Most of this material is also available on the 6.050J/2.110J Web site http://mtlsites.mit.edu/Courses/6.050.

• Spring 2008 Signup Sheet
• Spring 2008 Home Page
• General Information
• Personnel
• Unit 1-2 Resources (this page)
• 6.050J/2.110J Notes
  • Preface
  • Chapter 1: Bits
  • Chapter 2: Codes

Reading Assignment

• Notes, Preface
• Notes, Chapter 1
• Notes, Chapter 2

Note: the 6.050J/2.110J notes, problem sets, and solutions, as well as several recommended resources, are in Portable Document Format (PDF). These may be viewed with Adobe Acrobat Reader, which you can download free if you do not already have it. If you are on Athena, the reader is already installed for you. If you are using Mac OS X, that operating system incorporates a PDF viewer so you do not need Acrobat Reader.

Resources

Technical

• S. A. Ward and R. H. Halstead, Jr., "Computation Structures," MIT Press and McGraw-Hill; 1990. 6.004 text
• Anant Agarwal and Jeffrey H. Lang, "6.002 Notes: Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits," Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; version 7.1, January 27, 2003
• Boolean Algebra: There are many excellent descriptions of Boolean Algebra at various technical levels on the Web. You can find many through Google.
• John G. Truxal, "The Age of Electronic Messages," McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, New York, NY; 1990. Lots of examples of codes, at an introductory level.

Historical

• George Boole (1815 - 1864)
• Augustus De Morgan (1806 - 1871)
• Geoffrey Wilson, "The Old Telegraphs," Phillimore and Co., London, UK; 1976.

Help Wanted

6.050J/2.110J students: be the first to suggest a resource, for example a useful Web site or a good book or article, to add to the list above. Send your suggestion by e-mail during Spring 2008 to 6.050-staff at mit.edu.