prerequisites

[nibot]

Because I was "bored," I dumped the course structure of the Physics and Mathematics departments into GraphViz.

Comments

[deathweasel.livejournal.com]

I like you. You're interesting.

[shamster.livejournal.com]

The color scheme of your livejournal page makes it too difficult to read.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

I'm amazed they've all got prerequisites like that. At least half of the courses in the Stanford math department are the kind I describe as having a "suspicious lack of prerequisites". I suppose if you understand half the words in the course description, then you know whether or not you can take the class.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

A lot of the higher-numbered graduate courses listed only "graduate standing and consent of the instructor" or somesuch vagueness. Also, there is some ambiguity because some courses require X AND Y as prerequisites and others require X OR Y. Moreoever, there are anti-requisites (courses that disqualify you from another course), co-requisites, and recommended pre-requisites. Recommended prerequisites I put in sometimes with a dashed edge. The others I might put in sometime. I want to color it by courses I've taken, courses I'm eligible for, and courses offered in a given semester. Automatically, of course.. I'm too lazy to do that by hand, I think. (-:

[hukuma.livejournal.com]

Some of the graph seems redundant. For example, math245a requires math135 and math113, but math135 already has math113 as a prerequisite. But checking, this seems that this isn't a bug in your graph, but rather a bug in the math course structure.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I tried to eliminate prerequisites that are already present transitively, but I only 'eyeballed' it. It would be pretty easy to write a preprocessor that did that...

GraphViz has pretty nifty support for subgraphs (i.e., a portion of the graph surrounded in a box or a bubble) so I was thinking I might separate topology, analysis, etc.

I don't really know what the purpose is, but somehow it seemed entertaining. (-: