CSC165: Third Week

            Welcome to my second blog on the course CSC165. As stated in my previous blog, this class is quite challenging but also very rewarding. Logic and reasoning is one of my favourite areas of study as it makes you think very abstractly. I was right in assuming I messed up one question in the first tutorial quiz but I know what I did incorrectly and still feel confident about the material we have covered. I feel as though I did much better in this week’s tutorial quiz.

            Throughout the third week of CSC165: Mathematical Expression and Reasoning for Computer Science, we began by learning about conjunction (“and”) and disjunction (“or”). I also learned the symbols for “and” & “or” which are an arrow pointing up and an arrow pointing down, respectively. The only frustrating thing about conjunction and disjunction is the English usage of “and” & “or” sometimes varies from the logic and mathematical usage, so it is important to note the difference. In logic, “and” will combine two statements by declaring they are both true. Using “or” will combine two statements by declaring that at least one of them is true. It is also known in English as “and/or”. After conjunction and disjunction, we went more into depth with negation. Negation is a concept that I do not find too difficult. It is pretty straightforward.

            A few things that I found really useful this week that I feel will help me immensely in this course:

1.   During the tutorial, our TA put a list of statements that mean the same thing but use different symbols on the board. It really help me understand what the statements and symbols mean.
2. In Monday and Wednesday’s lectures, professor Heap went over truth tables which really assist you in interpreting predicates. To me, they are much more helpful than Venn Diagrams.
3. I learned that many laws in arithmetic also apply in logic, such as the commutative, associative and distributive properties.
4. De Morgan’s Law is useful when trying to negate certain statements.

             This course does not relate much to all of my other courses and I feel like it will stay that way throughout the whole semester. I am enrolled in MAT135: Calculus 1 (A), but I feel like if I had chosen MAT137, it would relate to CSC165 much more. Assignment #1 has been released and is due on October 3^rd. I am working with two other guys on this assignment and at this point we have pretty well all of it done. I am quite confident in our answers which is reassuring because midterms are slowly approaching, with the midterm for this class being on October 8^th. It is nerve-wracking but I should be okay for it as long as I read over my notes and do many practice problems. I will keep this blog updated weekly with my frustrations, worries, achievements, and basically every other emotion. Thank you for reading.

            -J.M.

CSC165: First Two Weeks

            Hello, welcome to my blog on CSC165: Mathematical Expression and Reasoning for Computer Science. This blog post is on the first two weeks of CSC165. The first day was a bit of an introduction, I did not learn too many new things other than what the topics this particular half year course will cover. What we mainly focused on in the first week of class was set properties, quantifiers, universal claims (i.e: all), and existential claims (i.e: some). During the first week, I learned many new symbols such as the symbols for subsets, “for all” (each), “there is” (exists), intersections, unions, and complements. Starting the second week we continued with quantifiers and learned how to verify or falsify quantified claims which I found quite interesting. Example: to verify a universal claim (for all), show at least one counter-example to the claim. Afterwards, we continued on to implication, which is a difficult concept to grasp at first but is stimulating to think about. In implication, there is an antecedent and a consequent. If A is the antecedent and B is the consequent, then we can say “If A, then B”. With implication there is also a converse and contrapositive example. If you reverse the direction of an implication, you will get the converse example of that implication. If you toggle and reverse an implication, you get its contrapositive example. This uses a new symbol as well, which negates a statement. I will continuously practice implication and try to master it by providing myself with example problems and re-reading my notes from class.
              So far this course seems like it will be really rewarding. Although I feel like I messed up one question on this week’s tutorial quiz, I still feel confident about the information we have learned thus far. Currently, I am also enrolled in CSC108: Introduction to Computer Programming. One similarity between the courses that I have already noticed is CSC165 touches upon the programming language “Python” which is the same language that is focused on in CSC108.  I realize CSC165 will be more of a challenging course, but it is actually very interesting. The logical topics that will be covered appeal to me and I hope to convey my excitements, frustrations, confusions, achievements and everything else in my upcoming blog posts. Thank you for reading.

            - J.M.