| Date | Topic | Reference | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 26 | Intro, Vertex Cover | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 1.1 | |
| Jan 31 | Steiner Tree, TSP | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 2.4, Exercise 2.5 | |
| Feb 2 | Greedy: Set Cover | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 1.6 | |
| Feb 4 | Greedy: Max Coverage, k-Center | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 2.2, Exercise 2.11 | |
| Feb 9 | Local Search: Max Cut and Weighted Max Cut | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video | HW1 released |
| Feb 11 | Local Search: Min Degree Spanning Tree | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 2.6, 9.3 | |
| Feb 16 | Rounding and Dynamic Programming: Knapsack | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 3.1 | |
| Feb 18 | Rounding and Dynamic Programming: Min Makespan Scheduling | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 3.2 | HW1 due, HW2 released |
| Feb 23 | Intro to LPs for Approximation Algorithms | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 1.2, 1.3, 4.3, Appendix A | |
| Feb 25 | Deterministic Rounding: Metric Uncapacitated Facility Location | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 4.5 | |
| Mar 2 | Randomized Rounding: Set Cover and UFL | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 1.7, 5.8 | |
| Mar 4 | Randomized Rounding: Integer Multicommodity Flow | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 5.10, 5.11 | HW2 due, HW3 released |
| Mar 12 | Randomized Rounding: Group Steiner Tree | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Notes from CMU, GKR paper | |
| Mar 14 | Tree Embeddings and Group Steiner Tree | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video | |
| Mar 16 | Tree Embeddings: FRT | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 8.5 | |
| Mar 18 | LPs as Metrics: s-t Mincut and Multiway Cut | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 8.1, 8.2 | HW3 due, HW4 released |
| Mar 23 | LPs as Metrics: Multiway Cut and Multicut | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 8.2 | |
| Mar 25 | LPs as Metrics: Multicut | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 8.3 | |
| Apr 1 | LP duality and flow/cut gaps | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 1.4, Appendix A | HW4 due, HW5 released |
| Apr 6 | Dual Fitting and Primal-Dual Algorithms | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 1.5, 1.6, 7.1, 7.3 | |
| Apr 8 | Primal-Dual: Steiner Forest | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 7.4 | |
| Apr 13 | Strengthening Relaxations: Knapsack-Cover Inequalities | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 7.5 | |
| Apr 15 | Semidefinite Programming: Max-Cut | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 6.1, 6.2 | HW5 due |
| Apr 20 | Semidefinite Programming: Correlation Clustering and Max-2SAT | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 6.4 | |
| Apr 27 | Hardness of Approximation and the PCP Theorem | Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 16.1, 16.2, 16.3 | |
| Apr 29 | Hardness of Approximation: Two-Prover Proof Systems and Label Cover | Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 16.4 |