| Date | Topic | Reference | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 23 | Intro, Vertex Cover | Lecture Notes, Video, Chapter 1.1 | |
| Jan 25 | Steiner Tree, TSP | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 2.4, Exercise 2.5 | |
| Jan 30 | Greedy: Set Cover | Lecture Notes, Video, Chapter 1.6 | |
| Feb 1 | Greedy: Max Coverage, k-Center | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 2.2, Exercise 2.11 | |
| Feb 6 | Local Search: Max Cut and Weighted Max Cut | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video | HW1 released |
| Feb 8 | Local Search: Min Degree Spanning Tree | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 2.6, 9.3 | |
| Feb 13 | Rounding and Dynamic Programming: Knapsack | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 3.1 | |
| Feb 15 | Rounding and Dynamic Programming: Min Makespan Scheduling | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 3.2 | HW1 due, HW2 released |
| Feb 20 | Intro to LPs for Approximation Algorithms | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 1.2, 1.3, 4.3, Appendix A | |
| Feb 22 | Deterministic Rounding: Metric Uncapacitated Facility Location | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 4.5 | |
| Feb 27 | Randomized Rounding: Set Cover and UFL | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 1.7, 5.8 | |
| Feb 29 | Randomized Rounding: Integer Multicommodity Flow | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 5.10, 5.11 | HW2 due, HW3 released |
| Mar 5 | Randomized Rounding: Group Steiner Tree | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Notes from CMU, GKR paper | |
| Mar 7 | Tree Embeddings and Group Steiner Tree | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video | |
| Mar 12 | Tree Embeddings: FRT | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 8.5 | |
| Mar 14 | LPs as Metrics: s-t Mincut and Multiway Cut | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 8.1, 8.2 | HW3 due, HW4 released |
| Mar 26 | LPs as Metrics: Multiway Cut and Multicut | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 8.2 | |
| Mar 28 | LPs as Metrics: Multicut | Lecture Notes, Chapter 8.3 | |
| Apr 2 | LP duality and flow/cut gaps | Lecture Notes, Chapter 1.4, Appendix A | |
| Apr 4 | Dual Fitting and Primal-Dual Algorithms | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 1.5, 1.6, 7.1, 7.3 | HW4 due, HW5 released |
| Apr 9 | Primal-Dual: Steiner Forest | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 7.4 | |
| Apr 11 | Strengthening Relaxations: Knapsack-Cover Inequalities | Lecture Notes, Video, Chapter 7.5 | |
| Apr 16 | Semidefinite Programming: Max-Cut | Lecture Notes, Lecture Notes, Video, Chapters 6.1, 6.2 | |
| Apr 18 | Semidefinite Programming: Correlation Clustering and Max-2SAT | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 6.4 | HW5 due |
| Apr 23 | Hardness of Approximation and the PCP Theorem | Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 16.1, 16.2, 16.3 | |
| Apr 25 | Hardness of Approximation: Two-Prover Proof Systems and Label Cover | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 16.4 |