Course syllabus

Course PM

This page contains the program of the course. Other information, such as learning outcomes, teachers, literature, examination, and old exams, can be found in a separate course PM.

Program

The schedule of the course is in TimeEdit and in the table below. Each week there are two or three lectures. There is also an exercise session, usually on Thursdays. In addition there are two Workshops, one in the third week of the course and one in the sixth. For each of these workshops, each student chooses one of the time slots in the corresponding week to attend. Attendance is obligatory. Finally, there are two obligatory group assignments that need to be handed in. 

Details about the literature is found in the course PM; the relevant chapters for the different lectures are listed in the table below. Overheads and other material used in the lectures will be posted on Canvas before the lectures. 

There will be two parallel exercise sessions, and you can choose to attend either (or none). Lorents Landgren will teach in Swedish, while Isac Boström will teach in English. The teachers will demonstrate solutions to specific exercises, listed in the table below, and there will be time for discussions and individual help. The most important exercises are underlined. 

Lists of additional recommended exercises are also found below. Generally exercise sessions will focus on material from the lectures roughly one week earlier, so you have time between the lecture and the exercise class to work on the exercises.

Lectures will not be recorded or streamed this year. However, recordings of lectures from 2024 are avaliable here. 

The following sections of Dobrow are NOT part of the curriculum: 3.9, 3.10, 5.5, 5.6, 6.8, 9.1,9.2,9.3.

Assignments

An important part of the course are the three obligatory assignments. They should be solved and submitted in small groups of 2-3 students. When answering these assignments it is of course not allowed to use AI tools. The groups are created by the students themselves. It may be a good idea to find a group directly, as you can then get started working together with somebody. One way to find group partners is to use "Discussions" here in Canvas. If you need help, you may contact Petter.

When your group is ready to submit answers to the first assignment, one group member goes to the "People" menu and the "Assignment groups" menu. Select a group without members, and then invite your group partners into the group. The answers are then submitted in the name of this group. This ensures that all group members get graded, and get feedback, as they should. Normally the same people will work together for all three assignments, but occasionally students switch groups, or drop out of the course. If this happens, you must mail me with complete details about who is working on the assignments, and who is not. Submitting answers in the name of a group that contains members that have not contributed is otherwise a kind of cheating. Unfortunately, Canvas does not allow changes to groups that have already submitted answers.  

For more details on the assignments go to the list at the bottom of this page.

Workshops

This is a new addition for 2026. They are follow-ups of the written assignments, but their content is not the same as the assignment contents, it is more that doing the assignments will prepare you for the workshops. At the workshops, only use of pen and paper is permitted, no other tools. You will receive questions and discuss in pairs or small groups, and then you will present your answers to everybody. This will be repeated in several stages. 

It is obligatory for all students to attend one time slot for Workshop 1, and one time slot for Workshop 2; there are 10 time slots to sign up for for each workshop. The maximum number of students in each time slot is 16, so if your schedule is tight so that you need to attend a particular time slot, it is advisable to sign up quickly. 

Some recommended exercises

Dobrow: 

Chapter 1: 1, 3, 7, 17, 26, 33

Chapter 2: 1, 3, 5, 9, 11, 25

Chapter 3: 1, 3, 7, 11, 13, 19, 33

Chapter 4: 1, 3, 7, 17, 23, 33

Chapter 5: 1, 3, 7, 15

Chapter 6: 1, 3, 7, 9, 15, 19

Chapter 7: 3, 7, 11, 13, 21, 29

Chapter 8: 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 19

Some solutions.

NOTE: It is highly recommended to practice solving old exams: They are available, together with solutions, from the PM page.

In the compendium, all exercises are recommended, including those not listed in the schedule below. Solutions can be found in an Appendix of the compendium. 

IMPORTANT: The selection of exercises above is intended as a study help. It is NOT the case that theory, techniques, or ideas mentioned in the lectures but not "trained" in the exercises above cannot appear on the exam! You are expected to know and understand theory well enough to be able to apply it even when you have not done exercises with it.

If you have questions about the exercises above (or any other exercises) you are welcome to ask questions at the exercise classes. In these classes, we will mainly go through together the separate list of exercises listed in the schedule below.

Lectures and exercise classes

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