Week 4

Sorry this sLOG post is a bit late, I was working on Assignment 1 for CSC148 for all of Friday and only just got around to doing this. I'm going to focus more on the first test this Wednesday than I am on the lectures for the week in this post, so here goes.

This was my first testing experience at University and the first thing I noticed - it's a big room. In High School the biggest test of the year was written in the Gym and that room is still smaller (floor area, not volume) than the Exam Centre writing room. The test itself was remarkably simple; I had expected to be using de Morgan's law or other laws of con/disjunction and I had written a ton of them down, but we only did stuff from around week 1-2 with translating between symbol and english. As I posted in week 1, I have a very effective strategy for that so I got a lot of good use out of it on the test (you can look at my test and see very clearly that I used it).

The only question I really had trouble with was the last question, which I tried a whole bunch of random solutions to, going about it through trial and error. However I soon realized that wasn't working and I switched methods. Instead I rewrote the statements that we were trying to verify/falsify from statements involving a lot of ands and ors into statements involving implication. That way, when I added a number to set D, I had a bunch of easy implications telling me what to do in order to make one statement true and the other false.

I hope that I did well on this test - I definitely feel that I did - and I look forward to the second half of the course!

Week 3

Proofs! I love proofs! And apparently, so does everybody at University! I suppose proofs are fundamental to mathematics, so it makes sense that they're so popular in math streams.

Anyway, I'm going to start with positive opinions on proofs in this course. I really like how proofs are structured here; we have the assumption, then indent to indicate the universe where this assumption holds true and continue on. That is a lot more concise than many other forms where it is simply "write this up here and then continue on down the list". I think that the way proofs are structured here is going to be the way I write proofs in all situations from now on.

As for negative things I found about proofs, I really don't like the lack of examples because it is hard to conceptualize how these proofs will eventually look. An issue that comes up with that is the complicated notation used for proofs here, which I really need an example to fully understand. I really hope an example comes on Monday, otherwise I will be totally lost when trying to conduct a proof. Either way, proofs are a concept I hope to grasp fully this year and I think this course might be the number one contributor to that goal.