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.