Theory of computing

Sometime in middle school, you were taught how to multiply and add large numbers. You may have noticed then that multiplication took longer to perform than addition. Why is that? Is it because multiplication is somehow a fundamentally harder problem? Or were you just taught an inefficient way to multiply large numbers? Is there a faster way to multiply large numbers? And how do we define faster anyway? The primary focus of this course is computational complexity theory, which is the branch of computer science that uses the tools of mathematics and logic to answer questions like these. Topics include models of computation, problem hardness, and computability.