Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of Mechanical Engineering 6.050J/2.110J – Information, Entropy and Computation – Spring 2016

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 2016 Signup Sheet
• Spring 2016 Home Page
• General Information
• Personnel
• Frequently Asked Questions
• 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
• Cartoon, “Transcribing RNA to Proteins”
    http://mtlsites.mit.edu/Courses/6.050/2014/notes/rna-to-proteins.html

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

• Stephen A. Ward and Robert H. Halstead, Jr., “Computation Structures,” MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, New York, NY; 1990. Formerly served as 6.004 text
• Anant Agarwal and Jeffrey H. Lang, “Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits,” Elsevier Inc., San Francisco, CA; 2005. Text for 6.002
• Michael A. Nielsen and Isaac L. Chuang, “Quantum Computation and Quantum Information,” Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K.; 2000. A good reference for qubits and all of quantum information, written before Prof. Chuang returned to MIT
• Boolean Algebra: There are many excellent descriptions of Boolean Algebra at various technical levels on the Web. You can find more than you want through Google or other search engines
• 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 2016 to 6.050-staff at mit.edu.