Algorithms II

CS 502 is the graduate continuation of the algorithms sequence, where the focus shifts from "can you code a sort" to proving correctness, bounding resources tightly, and recognizing when a new problem reduces to one you've already solved. Most of the term lives on graphs — shortest paths, spanning trees, max-flow — but you also spend serious time on amortized analysis of Fibonacci heaps and disjoint sets, plus string matching, FFT, and approximation schemes for NP-hard problems. Assessment is two midterms, a final, and three projects, with the projects pushing you to actually implement and reason about the trickier data structures. It's the backbone course that the rest of theoretical CS (complexity, cryptography, networks, ML theory) leans on.