Week 4...

This week brought stress in the form of Assignment 1.

Questions that seemed easy at first glance kept getting more and more confusing as I pondered different ways of answering them.

This assignment made me realize my weakness with Venn diagrams. It took several tries and study sessions with my friends before we could all settle on the same answers. As usual my problem with negation came up when asked to negate an English sentence. The word "unless" confused me into believing it is an 'iff' statement, but only now have I realized it means 'if not' when used in logic. 

The lecture this week was interesting and the activity to solve a problem made the lecture fun. Transitivity and Bi-implications seems easy enough to understand. 

As of now, mid-term seems to be the only thing on my mind and I hope the mix of English with symbols doesn't confuse me.

(Goodluck to everyone !! :D ) 

Less confusion ...More practice...

Week 3

This week was surprisingly more simple and easy to understand. Prof. Larry's examples make things very easy and I'm pretty sure I'm going to use the example of red Ferrari quite often now. 

Like I mentioned earlier, being in MAT137 definitely helps as everything we covered this week has been covered in calculus, and I've already learnt things like Venn diagram, conjunction and disjunction in high school. 

Negation is however something that still confuses me. I still haven't got the hang of exactly how to do it. Certain times I get it right and other time when the answer seems simple enough, it still turns out wrong. So far negation seems to be the only thing that frustrates me the most. 

The truth tables helped greatly and cleared some small doubts. 

The laws seemed simple enough as I have learnt them in high school boolean algebra. 

I hope to clear my doubts in negation as soon as possible as they seem to be a major part of the assignement. 

(So glad I took MAT137 and CSC165 together ! )

The story so far...

Mathematical Expression & Reasoning for Computer Science

The course so far has been both highly interesting and made quite easy to follow. While it isn't as easy as I expected, it definitely is fun to learn. Prof. Larry's slides (and memes) are extremely helpful and have greatly improved my understanding of the course. The examples provided and the exercises we do in class  are really useful. I especially love the fact that while the subject is "mathematical" expression, we still learn the concept in terms of everyday English which then translates to Math.

I have observed from personal experience that going through the notes/slides before and after the lecture is extremely beneficial. Not only does it first prepare us for what we'll be learning in the following lecture, but reading them after makes it easier to understand where we went wrong, or what we did understand perfectly.

Having taken Math in high school, the introduction to the use of quantifiers, sets and Venn diagrams in Lecture #2 was comforting. MAT137 and CSC165 seem to be have started off with the same basics which makes it so much more easier to follow. While I do still get confused sometimes, I hope to solve my problems with more practice and probably more study sessions with my friends. 
Study sessions with classmates is something I personally recommend as it proved very fruitful. It is much easier to understand a concept when there can be a discussion on a particular question and the doubts can be asked back and forth and even cleared promptly. 

All in all, good course, cool lectures. I'm one step away from confusion.
So far, so good :)