The primary teaching language is English (lecture slides shown also in Czech).

Předmět MA010 je od roku 2009 vyučován primárně anglicky (přesto uvidíte i české slidy na přednášce).

All the MA010 lectures and tutorials will be held in English.

Generaly, all announcements for the students of MA010 will be posted in the MA010 news thread https://is.muni.cz/auth/df/aktuma010/ (in English), and only the most important ones will be also sent via email. Students should read this forum regularly and pay attention to the announcements. No excuses will be allowed for not reading these announcements.

Studentům MA010 je doporučována aspoň základní pasivní znalost angličtiny. Pro ty, kteří nejsou až tak sběhlí v angličtině, je k dispozici původní plnohodnotný učební text v češtině a na přednáškách budou paralelně promítány i české slidy. Při hlášení na cvičení si také můžete všimnout, která z nich mají vyučující českého původu. Rozdělení cvičení bude oznámeno při zveřejnění rozvrhu.

Obecně oznámení a aktuality pro studenty MA010 budou vždy dány na tematickém fóru předmětu https://is.muni.cz/auth/df/aktuma010/ (obvykle anglicky) a jen ty nejdůležitější z nich budou rozeslány i emailem. Nebude odpovídáno na samostatné dotazy, které již jsou na web stránkách zodpovězeny, ani nebudou přijímány omluvy z důvodu neznalosti těchto oznámení.

This online syllabus in IS MU

All the teaching materials of MA010 are organized and posted online in IS MU. Refer to the list of study materials and weekly syllabus below... (There you can find all you need.)

https://is.muni.cz/el/1433/podzim20**/MA010/index.qwarp  (fill in the correct year in the link!)

Course discussion group in IS MU

Our subject has its discussion group in IS MU where students should post their questions and comments regarding both the curriculum and course organization. We advise students to use this discussion since the answers then serve all other students (and so we strongly prefer to answer there and not in private emails).

https://is.muni.cz/auth/cd/1433/podzim20**/MA010  (fill in the correct year in the link!)

Attendance of lectures and tutorials  -  Docházka

MA010 lectures are 2h each week while tutorials are 2h bi-weekly, see in your timetable. Attendance of lectures is voluntary, and videorecording of lectures will be available later on. On the other hand, tutorials are compulsory and penalties will be imposed on students not coming to their tutorials regularly.

Tutorial attendance rules: Out of the usual six (of bi-week frequency) tutorials, one can be skipped without any consequence. If a student skips two tutorials without a proper excuse recorded in IS(!), then he receives -5 "malus" points, and if he skips more than two tutorials, then the penalty is -10 points. Beware that these negative points count towards the semester limit of >=10 points, see below!

Docházka na cvičení: Ta jsou povinná a studenti mohou bez následků vynechat jen jedno z běžných šesti až sedmi cvičení za semestr. Při vynechání dvou bez omluvenky v IS student získá malus -5 bodů, při více už -10 bodů. Tyto penalizace se počítají do semestrálního hodnocení s dolním limitem 10 bodů, viz níže!

Study materials MA010

For start (prior to 2009), all the course materials had been prepared in Czech, including an extensive self-contained study text of Graph Theory (Teorie grafů) with all lectures and tutorials. These materials are provided here to all students understanding Czech language.

For English-only-speaking students, the following materials are provided:

• A very good introductory textbook Invitation to Discrete Mathematics (by Jiří Matoušek, Jaroslav Nešetřil) is available in the library, from Google books (restricted), or on the market. Significant parts of our curriculum are originally based on this book, and references to it are provided throughout the lectures in this guide. It is highly advised for every student to (at least) look into this book. While our course is interested in chapters from number 4 "Graphs: an introduction", the first three chapters cover basic discrete mathematics which students should already know from, e.g., the IB000 course. 
• A Czech edition of the book, Kapitoly z diskrétní matematiky, is available as well (quite cheap). There are only slight differences in the section numbering between these editions.
• The course slides are translated from Czech into English, and posted on the web. Some materials from the tutorials will also be collected and posted later on. No translation of the whole study text is planned (since there are so many more textbook available in English).
• Many other, online available, graph-theory related study materials are collected in the course, and posted on the web as well. The collected materials are (or will be) referenced from this online guide. Particularly recommended is Diestel's Graph Theory textbook which is our source for the more advanced topics not covered in the introductory textbook.

Lectures MA010

The whole curriculum of MA010 is organized into lectures where each lecture corresponds to one week of teaching (of the semester). The content of each lecture is summarized in the syllabus below (and is supplemented with online accessible references), and will be posted on the web as the course slides (in PDF). The first eight lectures constitute the mandatory core curriculum which every student must learn to pass the MA010 course. Subsequent lectures (nine to higher) present, time depending, some additional interesting graph material which may vary from year to year, and which will not be examined directly (though its knowledge will also be helpful at the final exam).

Every lecture of MA010 is complemented with a tutorial hour (organized bi-weekly), which is devoted to informal explanation of the presented material and practicing graph theory exercises. In tutorials, students should learn how to understand and use the theoretical knowledge from lectures. Notice (cf. above) that attendance to the MA010 tutorials is compulsory.

Course examination requirements

Students are expected to learn all the presented curriculum of (at least) the first eight mandatory lectures on Graph theory. This includes understanding the definitions, knowledge of the presented statements (theorems) and algorithms, and ability to reproduce the presented mathematical proofs and give new similar proofs. To be very accurate, this subject is not about memorizing the statements (definitions, proofs, etc.), but about understanding them, and so the exams will be given such that even perfectly memorized knowledge will be useless.

Understand, not memorize!

Examination score will consist of three parts summed up together:

• 20% Compulsory midterm classroom test, about basic graph properties, composed of questions similar to those given in the online questionaries below. Maximum score will be 20 points, and at least 10 points will be required for the final exam. A failed midterm test can be repeated once.
• 80% Final written exam (cf. also sample past exams):
  • Up to 40 points will be given for answering routine questions about graphs and their properties. Though routine, not all the questions will be easy.
  • Up to 40 additional points will be given for solving rather difficult graph problems. It is expected that only mathematically-skilled students will be able to fully solve this part since it requires creative mathematical thinking and ability to give formal mathematical proofs.
• bonus See below for possibilities of getting extra bonus points.

Altogether, more than 50 points will be required to pass the exam. Final grade will be determined from the final point score, using a scale announced during the course exam period.

Velmi stručně česky

Při testech a zkouškách někdy bude (ale ne vždy) na výběr mezi češtinou a angličtinou. Body bude možné získat na povinném semestrálním testu (nejvýše 20, požadováno je aspoň 10 ke zkoušce) zhruba v půli semestru. Dále pak na zkoušce bude možno získat až 40 bodů za příklady testující rutinní (ale ne až tak snadné) porozumění teorii grafů a dalších až 40 bodů za obtížné příklady zkoušející vaši schopnost řešit nové matematické problémy a podávat matematické důkazy. Pro úspěšné složení zkoušky je nutno v součtu získat více než 50 bodů.

Pamatujte, jedná se o matematický předmět. Musíte mu porozumět, ne se učit nazpaměť!

After final exams

Once the grading of your final exam is finished, you may see the results scanned into IS (not only your points, but also the scans of your corrected answer sheets). Read those carefully and learn from your mistakes. Graders should post their grading scheme and general comments on your solutions into the appropriate discussion thread in IS (usually a new one for this particular exam). If there is a clear mistake in grading of your exam, then you may contact the grader directly with a clear and rigorous explanation of what happened and why your solution deserves more points (referring to the posted grading scheme). Particularly, never ask to "look at my solution again since I want more points, but I do not know where to get them"! Such requests will simply be ignored.

If, after careful reading(!), you are still in doubt about your answers and what was wrong with them, then ask the graders in the appropriate discussion thread in IS - this is important since usually more than one student has the same mistakes and others may learn from them. For these reasons we will not answer individual emails about your mistakes.

You pass the exam if your total score after the final exam is strictly greater than 50 points. The final grade then depends on the total score; currently, the "exchange rate" is E above 50, D for >=57, C for >=64, B for >=71, A for >=80. This may, however (though unlikely), change with any future exam term.

Further study of graphs

If you have liked the course and would like to continue with graph theory or graph algorithms, then ask me for a suitable (custom-made) thesis topic in this area, or come to one of my advanced courses on graphs: courses MA051-53 until 2014, and since 2015 in my seminar groups in the IV125 Formela Seminar (every Spring).