COSC 3320: Algorithms and Data Structures: Fall 2026

Section 14875

Lecture Tu/Th 2:30-4pm: Location D3 W122 ,

Main Textbook: Algorithms, Jeff Erickson. Book site with PDF
Reference book: Algorithm Design Manual, Steven Skiena. Book website
Reference book: Algorithms, Gopal Pandurangan. Book site with PDF

Syllabus: Simple Syllabus

Coding exercises: Catalog

Instructor: Dr. Panruo Wu or pwu6@cougarnet.uh.edu
Office hour: Tuesday 1:30pm-2:15pm, Friday 2-3pm, or by email appointment (please schedule at least 2 days in advance).
Location: PGH 564

TAs and office hour & location: See their time and location in Discord events schedule

Name	Email
Neibert,Connor	crneiber@cougarnet.uh.edu
Wu,Isabel,	iwu10@cougarnet.uh.edu
Raza,Ali	araza25@cougarnet.uh.edu

News

09/02: Lab1: Binary Tree exercises is live
09/01: CPP Playground (pure client side C++ mini IDE) is live (caution: about 60MB download first time)
08/27: Homework 0 (HW0) is out on algotutor! (search for tag hw0)
08/27: Algotutor is live! Note that this is very early alpha software. Please report bug in discord.
08/24: AI use policy and recommendations

Course Schedule

Last modified: Aug 28, 2026. Note: materials might be revised up to right before the lecture time!

Current Week are marked yellow; Exams dates are marked cyan

Week	Tuesday	Thursday	HW
week 1	Aug 25 LEC1: Introduction Reading: Textbook Chapter 0 Introduction, Section 0.1, 0.2, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6 Algorithms, Pandurangan, Chapter 2.5.	Aug 27 Continue introduction.	HW0 out, due Sept 3 EOD
week 2	Sept 1 LEC2: Recursion Code/illustrations:hanoi.cpp, tile.html,Hanoi Animation, linear time (MoM) select Sample: solution, code recording	Sept 3 Cont'd Recursion
week 3	Sept 8 Cont'd Recursion	Sept 10 Cont'd Recursion
week 4	Sept 15 Review: HW1, More examples of recursiion, solving recurrences... And Q&A	Sept 17 LEC3: Backtracking Code/illustrations:N-Queens, Sudoku.cpp Red Green Game
week 5	Sept 22 Cont'd Backtracking	Sept 24 Cont'd Backtracking
week 6	Sept 29 Mid-term #1	Oct 1 LEC4: Dynamic Programming Code sample: Text Segmentaion on Cinderalla excerpt
week 7	Oct 6 Dynamic Programming Cont'd	Oct 8 Dynamic Programming Cont'd
week 8	Oct 13 Dynamic Programming Cont'd	Oct 15 LEC5: Greedy algorithms
week 9	Oct 20	Oct 22
week 10	Oct 27	Oct 29 LEC7: Graph Traversal
week 11	Nov 3 Mid-term #2	Nov 5 Cont'd Graph Traversal, topological sorting, strong components
week 12	Nov 10	Nov 12 Hash table, string, compression algorithm
week 13	Nov 17 LEC7: Minimum Spanning Tree	Nov 19 LEC8: Shortest Path
week 14	Nov 24 Shortest path cont'd	Nov 26 Thanksgiving! No class today
week 15	Dec 1 Review Session for Final.	Dec 3, LEC9: NP Completeness
Final Exam: Dec 10, 2-4pm
Dec 18, Final grade deadline