Book Image

Practical Discrete Mathematics

By : Ryan T. White, Archana Tikayat Ray
Book Image

Practical Discrete Mathematics

By: Ryan T. White, Archana Tikayat Ray

Overview of this book

Discrete mathematics deals with studying countable, distinct elements, and its principles are widely used in building algorithms for computer science and data science. The knowledge of discrete math concepts will help you understand the algorithms, binary, and general mathematics that sit at the core of data-driven tasks. Practical Discrete Mathematics is a comprehensive introduction for those who are new to the mathematics of countable objects. This book will help you get up to speed with using discrete math principles to take your computer science skills to a more advanced level. As you learn the language of discrete mathematics, you’ll also cover methods crucial to studying and describing computer science and machine learning objects and algorithms. The chapters that follow will guide you through how memory and CPUs work. In addition to this, you’ll understand how to analyze data for useful patterns, before finally exploring how to apply math concepts in network routing, web searching, and data science. By the end of this book, you’ll have a deeper understanding of discrete math and its applications in computer science, and be ready to work on real-world algorithm development and machine learning.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Part I – Basic Concepts of Discrete Math
7
Part II – Implementing Discrete Mathematics in Data and Computer Science
12
Part III – Real-World Applications of Discrete Mathematics

The Development of Search Engines over time

In this section, we will learn about the development of modern search engines on the internet. This will set the stage to learn about Google's PageRank algorithm. But, before we do that, let's briefly learn how older search engines worked and their shortcomings so that we can see why we need to tap into some deeper mathematics to solve the problem of ranking websites based on searches.

In the early 1990s, search engines were relatively simple. The search engine companies maintained databases of as many websites as they could. Users would search a word, say, chicken, and the search engines would search for websites using the word chicken and rank them based on how many times the word chicken appeared on the website. As you might suspect, this isn't necessarily the best approach.

There are several problems with these simple methods:

  • Web pages where a certain search word occurs frequently are not necessarily what...