Problem Solving: The folding of a paper and Week 3.

This week first we learned statements that included conjunctions (and), disjunctions (or), the negation of such statements. Now I felt that these were simple enough concepts to grasp since they were rather straight forward in my opinion.

Next were truth tables used instead of Venn diagrams which were essential when there are more than 3 sets. Say P(x) -> (Q(x) -> (R(x) -> (S(x)))), it's impossible (Well for me anyway) to draw such a diagram and it would simply not be feasible or organized in a way where it could be easily read and understood.

The more important content included the properties in logic such as the commutative property, associative, as well as the distributive property. Now for the properties although some were obvious, others like the distributive property were not obvious to me when I first learned it. As a result I essentially made 4 Venn diagrams for the 4 properties we learned just so I could convince myself that they were indeed true and so I could have a visual representation of what both sides of each property meant.

I feel like I understand the material but probably only superficially in the sense that I won't be able to solve more complicated problems at this time. What do I mean by this? I looked over at the tutorial for week 3 and at this moment I'm not exactly sure how to prove equivalence at all but the other 2/3 of it looks manageable. So I'm definitely going to go back and review the notes and slides to assure that I understand all of it. So next up is the problem solving of the pattern in a folded piece of paper in the post following this...

First week SLOG and also my first ever blog post!

So starting this course was rather exciting; I hadn't really had any ideas about what we would be learning in this course but after these two weeks I found it quite interesting. During just the first week I was already confused about the usage of the any and all methods - err I'm sorry, I probably meant functions...in python as I hadn't ever encountered them before. I spent probably about a tad bit less than an hour going through the slides and thinking each one through before moving on to the next. I then decided to look through python's api and it wasn't until I saw the code that I understood it much more clearly.

Note to myself and anyone else interested: Break everything down into the bare bones and then work your way back up and it'll contribute so much more to your understanding.

Next, during the second week I believe, though it is likely that I am wrong, were quantifiers, implications, converses, just to name a few off the top of my head. Now these weren't too difficult to grasp as I had already struggled with this in MAT137; although it was nice to hear these used in 'words' instead of being solely represented using mathematical symbols.

Anyway here's my first blog post, I do hope that I don't leave out too much or too little. My reticence, especially with writing long posts online, will most likely become apparent but hopefully will change over time.