CMU study guides, course by course
CMU's workload culture is the campus identity — 'my heart is in the work' is the unofficial motto for a reason — and the first-year CS and math sequence is famous for setting the bar immediately. Several flagship courses, 15-213 and 15-445 especially, publish their materials publicly and are studied worldwide, so the people searching these course codes are a mix of enrolled students under deadline and self-learners building their own curriculum.
CMU courses use a department number, a dash, and a course number — 15-112 is computer science, 21-127 is math, 76-101 is English. Credit is counted in units rather than semester hours: one unit is roughly one hour of work per week, and a standard course runs 9-12 units.
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15-112 — Fundamentals of Programming and Computer Science
15-112 is CMU's famous fast-paced introduction to programming in Python — control flow, functions, data structures, recursion, OOP, and efficiency — ending in an open-ended term project. Its public course website and the related CMU CS Academy platform give it a search footprint far beyond Pittsburgh.
15-110 — Principles of Computing
15-110 is CMU's gentler introduction to computing — Python programming plus computing concepts like data representation, algorithms, and the limits of computation — designed for students who aren't CS majors or who want a runway before 15-112. It's one of the largest courses on campus.
15-122 — Principles of Imperative Computation
15-122 teaches imperative programming with correctness front and center — contracts, loop invariants, and reasoning about code in the C0 teaching language before transitioning to real C — covering data structures from stacks and queues through hash tables, trees, and graphs. It's the second course of the CMU CS core.
15-150 — Principles of Functional Programming
15-150 teaches functional programming in Standard ML — types, recursion and induction, higher-order functions, and reasoning about programs as mathematical objects — alongside 15-122 in the CMU CS core. For most students it's the first time programming and proof become the same activity.
15-213 — Introduction to Computer Systems
15-213 is the famous CS:APP course — data representation, x86-64 assembly, caches, memory, linking, exceptions, virtual memory, and concurrency, taught through the legendary lab sequence (bomb lab, attack lab, cache lab, malloc lab, shell lab, proxy lab). Its textbook and materials are used worldwide, making it one of the most-searched CS courses on the internet.
15-251 — Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science
15-251 is CMU's sweeping theory course — proof techniques, finite automata, computability, complexity and P vs NP, randomness, and more — famous for its problem-heavy homework culture and collaborative solving sessions. It's where the CS major's mathematical maturity gets forged.
15-210 — Parallel and Sequential Data Structures and Algorithms
15-210 is CMU's algorithms-and-data-structures core course with a signature twist: everything is analyzed for parallelism from the start, using work and span in a functional framework. It builds on 15-150 and 15-122 and is the course where CMU's algorithm training diverges from every other school's.
15-281 — Artificial Intelligence: Representation and Problem Solving
15-281 is CMU's core AI course — search, constraint satisfaction, linear and integer programming, Markov decision processes, reinforcement learning, and game-theoretic reasoning — with programming assignments that implement the algorithms against real problem environments.
15-445 — Database Systems
15-445 is CMU's database systems course — storage, buffer pools, indexes, query execution and optimization, concurrency control, and recovery — built around implementing real components inside the BusTub teaching database in C++. Its public lectures and projects have made it the internet's default database-internals curriculum.
15-451 — Algorithm Design and Analysis
15-451 is CMU's advanced algorithms course — amortized analysis, network flow, linear programming and duality, NP-completeness and approximation, online and randomized algorithms — the senior-level capstone of the theory track after 15-210 and 15-251.
Mathematical Sciences
21-120 — Differential and Integral Calculus
21-120 is CMU's first calculus course — limits, derivatives, applications of differentiation, and the integral through the fundamental theorem — the standard entry point for students not placing into 21-122 via AP credit. It feeds every quantitative major on campus.
21-122 — Integration and Approximation
21-122 is CMU's second calculus course — integration techniques, applications, improper integrals, then sequences, series, and Taylor approximation — where most AP-credit students enter the math sequence. It's widely considered the harder half of first-year calculus.
21-127 — Concepts of Mathematics
21-127 is CMU's introduction to mathematical proof — logic, sets, functions, induction, number theory, and combinatorics — required early for CS and math majors as the gateway to everything proof-based, including 15-251. For most students it's the first course where the answer is an argument.
21-241 — Matrices and Linear Transformations
21-241 is CMU's first linear algebra course — systems and matrices, vector spaces, linear transformations, determinants, eigenvalues, and orthogonality — serving CS, science, and engineering students. It blends computation with proof more than most schools' equivalents.
21-259 — Calculus in Three Dimensions
21-259 is CMU's multivariable calculus course — vectors and surfaces, partial derivatives, multiple integrals, and the vector calculus capstone of line integrals, Green's, Stokes', and the divergence theorem — required across engineering and the sciences.
Statistics & Data Science
Machine Learning
English
Physics
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