Introduction to Convexity 553.465/553.665
TTh 3:00pm - 4:15pm, BLOOMBERG HALL 274



GENERAL INFORMATION

Instructor : Amitabh Basu
Office Hours : Wednesday 5:00--7:00pm, or email for appointment. Office Hours will be in my office : Whitehead 202A.
Email : basu [dot] amitabh [at] jhu [dot] edu

Teaching Assistant : Ning Liu will be the TA for our class. Ning's email is nliu15 [at] jhu [dot] edu.
Ning's office hours will be on Thursdays from 5--6:30pm.
Ning will also lead a discussion session on Fridays from 12 - 12:50p in Bloomberg Hall 178.

Notes/Texts : I will post lecture notes for the course. Please follow the link HERE. A version of the notes without the fancy footers and the cryptic motivation section can be found HERE.

Other useful textbooks and resources

Syllabus : The syllabus with list of topics to be covered is available HERE.
The main goal of this course is to introduce students to the structural and algorithmic aspects of convex geometry and analysis. The course will have roughly 3 modules: 1. Structure and properties of convex sets, 2. structure and properties of convex functions, 3. Introduction to convex optimization with an emphasis on algorithms for linear optimization/programming (LPs).

Schedule : A rough schedule is available HERE.

EXAM AND GRADING INFORMATION

There will one take home Midterm and a take home Final exam. In addition, I will regularly (approx. every week) post homework assigments here. You will be asked to hand in some of the HW problems which will be graded (approximately every two weeks). Seriously attempting ALL the homework problems is imperative for your success in the class, and they will give an indication of the kind of problems on the tests.

Homeworks Midterms and Final Grades